MUESLI? NO THANKS, I'LL HAVE SNIPE AND A PINT OF PORT: FROM CHURCHILL TO 007, A NEW BOOK REVEALS THE UNLIKELY BREAKFAST THAT FUELLED OUR GREATEST HEROES

By David Leafe

As Sir Winston Churchill settled into his seat on a flight to the U.S. in the summer of 1954, a steward handed him the breakfast menu.

It was clearly not to his liking. Taking his pen, the great man crossed out the items described on this meagre bill of fare and began scrawling out his own, very specific demands: a brace of snipe washed down with a pint of port.

Some suggest this was a joke, but in any case it was beyond the capabilities of a small in-flight kitchen — even for a Prime Minister.

When that hand-written list came up for auction four years ago, it revealed that the brace of snipe was only the start of it. Churchill’s early morning feast of choice actually extended across two separate trays.

The first groaned with poached eggs, toast, butter and jam, and a hefty selection of meats. The second bore a nod to good health with a token grapefruit, but alongside that was a bowl of sugar, a whisky and soda and one of his favourite cigars.

However, the author of a book highlighting the great Prime Minister’s eating and drinking habits says he was rarely up in time for breakfast, and started drinking Pol Roger champagne as soon as he surfaced.

Nutritionists might shudder at some of his choices, but Churchill obviously appreciated what they have been telling us for years — that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, or the ‘sexiest’, according to the American poet Anne Sexton.

That message is at the heart of an entertaining new book called The Breakfast Bible, written by food journalist Seb Emina. The most fascinating passages describe the breakfasts enjoyed by famous people over the centuries.

In 1660, for example, the diarist Samuel Pepys started the day with a banquet of ‘cold turkey pie, a goose and a collar of brawne’.

Three hundred years later, Elvis Presley began his day with a monster breakfast including ‘six large eggs cooked in butter with extra salt, one pound of bacon and half a pound of sausages’ or peanut butter and banana sandwiches.

Both menus would be tricky to rustle up before a busy day at work, but they do pose an intriguing question: what can literature and history tell us about putting together the perfect breakfast which, according to the American writer Hunter S. Thompson, is a ‘psychic anchor’?

F irst, we should probably avoid copying the meagre breakfasts of the 12th century. An early document tells of the breakfasting habits of the unfortunate choristers at St Paul’s Cathedral in London.

At a time when Catholic ritual forbade anyone from eating until after morning Mass, records show that these starving songsters were allowed to ‘break their fast’ with nothing more substantial than bread soaked in ale.

Not that it was all bad for Christians. Religious ritual is thought to have brought about the invention of that great British breakfast staple — bacon and eggs.

Since the consumption of both meat and dairy products was prohibited during Lent, the Medieval faithful would use up their remaining supplies of both on the day before Shrove Tuesday. Many households kept pigs, so this involved cooking ‘collops’, as rashers of bacon were known, alongside the fried eggs.

Inevitably, this was washed down with yet more ale, since tea was then unheard of.

In fact, the idea of breakfast with a nice cuppa didn’t occur to the English until 1662 when Charles II married Catherine de Braganza of Portugal.

When she arrived in Portsmouth that year, after a long crossing, Catherine was reportedly gasping for a cup of tea, the favourite drink at the Portuguese court.

It was so rare then that the puzzled English courtiers could only offer her beer, but Catherine’s taste for tea created an aristocratic fad which quickly spread.

Catherine also popularised the eating of marmalade — although she took it as an after-dinner treat, designed to aid digestion. The idea of spreading it on toast in the morning came much later.

One notable toast enthusiast was the novelist Jane Austen. As one of two spinster sisters in a family with six brothers, she was often called upon to prepare their daily breakfast. In her final, unfinished novel, Sanditon, she gives a description of the perfect toasting technique.

‘I reckon myself a very good toaster,’ says a fussy young man named Arthur Parker in one scene. ‘I never burn my toasts — I never put them too near the fire and yet, you see, there is not a corner but what is well browned.’

This wasn’t Austen’s only contribution to the breakfast debate. Her masterpiece, Emma, published in 1816, contained the first known literary reference to the boiling of eggs.

‘An egg boiled very soft is not unwholesome,’ says Emma’s father Mr Woodhouse, a dreadful hypochondriac, to an equally anxious neighbour.

Perfectly browned toast and a runny egg — breakfast with Jane Austen sounds delightful.

Charles Dickens, however, liked something more stimulating at the start of each day. He favoured two tablespoons of rum flavoured with cream for breakfast.

He also has one of his characters, the bullying dwarf Mr Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop, ‘devouring giant prawns with the heads and tails on’ and drinking boiling hot tea straight from the kettle.

We may find the idea of prawns for breakfast unusual, but to the 19th-century mind it was normal.

In the 20th century, Edward VII had little truck with the new-fangled ‘cornflakes’ being marketed as a breakfast food during his reign.

These were originally produced by the American John Harvey Kellogg, who was looking for a breakfast alternative which would help people stick to the vegetarian diet advocated by the Seventh Day Adventist Church, of which he was an enthusiastic member.

By contrast, the British king favoured an early-morning treat of a hollowed-out onion filled with chicken livers, cream and brandy.

Since the celebrated royal playboy also smoked 20 cigarettes and 12 cigars a day, it’s perhaps surprising that he lived as long as he did — passing away in 1910 at the age of 68.

Had he survived, he would have been very at home in the Buck’s Club, founded in London in 1919 as a bolt-hole for dissolute and rich young men. There, a barman named Pat McGarry invented the Buck’s Fizz — a combination of orange juice and champagne which gave these young roustabouts an excuse to start drinking early in the morning. The drink was also billed as a great hangover cure.

P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster had his own recipe for dealing with this particular affliction. After enjoying a hard night at the Drones, a louche establishment based on the Buck’s Club, his disapproving valet Jeeves would restore his spirits with a tincture of Worcestershire sauce, raw egg and pepper.

‘For a moment I felt as if somebody had touched off a bomb inside the old bean,’ says Bertie. ‘Then everything seemed suddenly to get all right. The sun shone in through the window, birds twittered in the tree-tops and, generally speaking, hope dawned once more.’

James Bond relied on a similar mixture to pick him up over breakfast in the Ian Fleming novel Thunderball. The ‘Prairie Oyster’ contained the additional ingredient of tabasco sauce, taken by Bond with a couple of aspirin.

On the whole, however, Agent 007 favoured rather more substantial breakfasts.

In From Russia With Love, Fleming describes how Bond’s breakfast in London was always the same — a fastidious combination of two large cups of ‘very strong’ coffee (from a shop called De Bry in Oxford Street) taken black without sugar; a fresh speckled brown, never white, egg laid by a French Marans hen, boiled for exactly three-and-a- third minutes.

It was always served with two slices of wholemeal toast and a selection of preserves and a ‘pat of deep yellow Jersey butter’.

Such enthusiasm was shared by Bilbo Baggins, in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. He enjoyed not one but two breakfasts a day. And that was before Elevenses.

Perhaps, however, breakfast is not so much about what or when you eat, but who you eat it with — a point not lost on Churchill. ‘My wife and I tried two or three times in the last 40 years to have breakfast together,’ he once said. ‘It was so disagreeable we had to stop.’

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 1104