But one of those meat miracles of Oxford was really tops of the tops. I learned my best breakfast from the British, and I brought it home to be the prop and pleasure of my age, and to improve the culture of America. It is tomatoes-and-bacon. Your bacon should be cut fairly thick, and it should have a nice balance of lean and fat, such as British bacon has naturally. You fry it, and then when it is all of a sizzle and half done, put into its seething juice small, half-ripe tomatoes, halved, and fry them along with the meat. Stir the bacon and the tomato halves often and baste the skins of the tomatoes with the hot fat. The flavors of smoked pig and tomatoes marry. They become a new flavor under the sun. You turn the rich united sauce upon slices of toast and serve piping hot. The man who gets up from this transplanted British breakfast of mine is a man who could never maltreat his aunts or do any other mean-spirited act.
Let me be the first to admit that the British toast is a sorry affair. I admit at once that it is often made the night before. And then, to insure its being absolutely dead and without flavor, it is put carefully into racks to keep the triangular slices apart and to chill them into dreariness.
Yet when you have what the English have to spread on these cold triangles of British ineptness, you forget the total loss in the toast. You have Oxford marmalade, for one thing, best of all the marmalades in an empire as famous for it as for its church architecture. It is made of the oranges of Seville. It has all bitter and beautiful Spain burned into it. The small, hard oranges of Spain are not worth the eating, raw. Our Floridas and Californias and—I do not dare to neglect the state that is like a second home to me!—best of all, our Texans put them into complete shade in the amount and sweetness of their juice. But if you have the kettle on for conserve, if you are talking of cooking the orange, then the tough little inhabitant of Spain puts out all the lesser lights of this earth. Cooked, the Spanish orange is a new thing, a fresher fruit than any on a subtropic tree.
The British do not stop with marmalade, though. They go on to strength and strength. They go on to gooseberries. Hairy, big caterpillary things British gooseberries are, when eaten raw. Esaus of berries. It takes a strong stomach to stomach them. But they are not supposed to be eaten that way. Cooked, once again, they are another substance. They are incredible delight. They are what we are always expecting figs to be but what they never are. It is the same story with the cold and rather tasteless British strawberry. Raw, he is an apology of a summer too brief to be convincing. Cooked, he becomes the Gospel according to Saint John.
Naturally, the British are more famous for their jams and conserves than for even their genius for compromise that has built the British Empire. The stone crocks of Dundee and of Blackwell, Ltd., have gone out to all the earth and their lines unto the ends of it. And there is nothing hid from the heat and sweet thereof! British jams are standard. Like Kennebec salmon, Virginia ham, and Texas saddles!
England, you see, is much too far north for fruits to come to fullest flavor. Her grapes are anticlimaxes. Her apricots, apologies. So the British, long ago, learned to add the lost sun to her fruits through fire and coals. Hence she has given the world its best jams. Even plain plum-and-apple, her appalling mixture of the two commonest of fruits, comes out a new fruit altogether, delightful and suave and smooth. The British won World War I on it. And it helped overthrow Hitler and win the last one.
So on through kipper and kidney, sausage and bacon-and-tomatoes, to the pinnacle of strawberry jam and orange marmalade, I sat among my British friends in my own college fastness, mellowed out into the poet I am and the philosopher I should like to be, if only human nature did not forever get in my way, and became the civilized creature I hope I am. It took me over two hours to get through all the covers and racks and jars and plates of that Gargantuan breakfast. But they were very golden hours. And during the whole day and night that followed, whatever the desolation of Brussels sprouts and uninspired potatoes might be at dinner, I did not get over the golden glow of that Brittanic breakfast. It has been long years now. I haven't, I believe, got over it yet.
Coffee? Yes, I vaguely recall coffee. But the less said about that the better. It tasted of chicory, which is not to my liking in coffee. And whatever taste it might have had was spoiled by the hot milk served with it. Let's forget the coffee.
If anything can bring us two great English-speaking nations together, to be the hope of future man for justice, equality, and democracy in this sad world, I firmly believe it will be our common passion for a good breakfast first thing in the day! And we should do well to add new angles to our heartiness at breakfast time by cultivating that best of all breakfasts, the British.
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