British Breakfast

The British breakfast! The never failing British art of making the most and best of things blossoms sweet in this gift to civilization.

Let me return to my initiation into British culture at that ancient seat of learning, Oxford University. Magnificent everywhere, here the national meal, which has built the most venerable and comfortable of cultures, flowers its finest.

To begin with, the Oxonian breakfast was a coat of many colors. How many courses it may have had, when it was in full cry, I don't recall exactly, but it mounted up to around six or seven, I swear. And it reached out and took in all the four corners of earth and most of the flavors in earth, sea, and sky, before it came to its sweet strawberry and orangy end.

Eating in our own room—that is a part of the secret of the Oxonian delight going by the name of breakfast.

Even the ordinary breakfast would taste better so. The world and its art coming to you, and you sitting in your studious fastness and accepting it—that was a peak which you may never sit on again, in a world of dwindling servitors and economic breakdowns in service of supply! That pleasure helped make the old Oxford I knew. But the dishes of the Oxonian breakfast had flavors to match the other magnificences.

I believe the fish came first. And when I say fish, I mean kippers. Kippers! They are the essence of England. There is a sizable fortune coming to any man over here who will take the time and trouble to learn to do for our herring what the British, at Yarmouth and other East Coast towns, do for theirs. Lord knows herring are good enough an naturel. But when they, through a light smoking over coals of hickory, turn into the golden slabs of toothsomeness which British herring are, then you have in your trembling hands what amounts to a miracle. American smoked herring are something. But our Kennebec turkeys are usually so salty it takes a strong man to stand up under them continuously. But the British manage to cure the fish the lightest of light browns, dried but not dried up, without recourse to brine. Kippers are practically fresh herring. They are fresher than fresh herring, for they have the aroma of a clean and savory smoke burned into them deep.

When I think of what come masquerading as kippers here in America, in cans or out, saltier than brine, soiled and sobered by oil, I feel there should be a law against our butchery, or the Norwegian butchery, of good sea meat. The English kipper is as dry and neat as a golden butterfly. He is never exactly the same, either, any two mornings in succession, or any two herring in a school, but has shadings of succulence that go with the particular sky or mood. Kippers are universally good, at a West End hotel or on the lowly stall of a village grocer. All you have to do is put them in a frying pan with a little water, and they blossom out under the mildest heat, with hardly a trace of oil, into a breakfast you could willingly prolong to twilight. The bones, too, seem to have disappeared, and in a herring this is an achievement. The skin shrivels into a nothing and melts away.

And, of course, the English do for other fish just as well as they do for the herring. Haddock, for instance. Pale, ordinary haddock. Any fish is transformed by a whiff of British smoke into a glory. Bouillabaisse indeed! Your college servitor lifted the pewter cover of his dish and set the glory under your nose.

But this was only the beginning of the pageant. The breakfast opened up into new vistas before you. Pewter cover after pewter cover came off, and there appeared a whole galaxy of meats. And meats that come in at an English breakfast are the subtle ones, capable of the most artistic permutations and combinations. Maybe the next joy your aged scout lifted his warming cover from would be kidneys. Browned small kidneys, stewed in their own dark juices until they are the quintessence of kidneys. Or mayhap sweetbreads came, and they too had been transfigured into something as dry and delicate as shad-spawn. Broiled over sea-coal fires, until they blush in sizzling loveliness, these breakfast meats came from the underground kitchens into the paneled beauty of your study and made you feel like a very lord of the realm.

Maybe it was sausages under the cover next. Sausages, most plebian of the plebes. But not in England. Not at Oxford. Once, I like to say, to every man, like his first kiss, comes the unforgettable first Oxfordshire sausage. Maybe it was the pig's nearness to learning, the mellow old folios, and the spires of Oxford Town that mellowed him so into fine sausage meat. Every last pig in Oxfordshire. Buckinghamshire, and Berkshire, I vow, sooner or later had the benefit of an Oxford education by coming into town on market days. Scholars had to climb over the makings of sausages when they went into the Bodleian. The downs of Bucks and Berks are deep in ancient British fatness that makes good pork, rich in mast the blue-bottomed Britons gathered and ate. Yet the aroma from old books in the Bodleian surely had something to do with flavoring the breakfast meat of scholars. And I think Oxonian herbs, thyme and bay and sage, grown in ancient college gardens, had a lot to do with it, too. The very bees which pour over the walls of the place, from garden to garden, mixed the spices that went into the chopped pork, to make it a triumph of mingled animal and vegetable kingdoms. All English sausages are good, but the Oxonian is the peak of peaks. It is not drowned in fats, nor inflated with cereals. Only in a handful of small and out-of-the-way Pennsylvania Dutch villages on our Eastern slopes will you find any creature to challenge this plump, stubby creature called the sausage of Oxford.