Since the day of Geoffrey Chaucer, 600 years ago, it has been the world's custom to look to France as the authority on good cooking and good eating as a vital part of civilization. I know it is like heresy for me, or any man, to put any people above the French as artists in the fine art of food. Especially the English, of all people, for the English have always had the reputation for heaviness in puddings and for lack of imagination in vegetables. But here I go bravely on the books, taking my life in my hands and declaring that the English are the superiors of the French when it comes to making good eating a cornerstone of civilization.
I got a part of my civilization from the British. And a goodly portion of that culture was gastronomic. I remember my breakfasts at Oxford, when I was mulling in the Muse's arms, as about the loftiest peaks to compare with the peaks I ate my way to glory on as a boy on a Maine farm.
The British breakfast, I swear on my honor as a scholar, is without a peer on this globe's crust. I mean, of course, the kind of breakfast that was de rigueur when I was a student of Oxon in the balmy days before world wars had done their worst. That was the breakfast that was served up—and up is the only word for it—dish after apocalyptic dish, by a servant grown white-headed in the benign long service of supply, and that took two hours and a half for me and my friends to get outside of. It was a parade of the ultimate subtleties in meats and fish and fruits. It weighted a man naturally towards poetry and philosophy. It broadened him out, not only in girth, but in the circumference of friendliness.
An Oxonian breakfast was the best piece of propaganda for a kindly inclination towards the British idea of a commonwealth of English-speaking nations old Cecil Rhodes or any other empire-builder could ever have thought up!
But the French, it is said, really do not count breakfast as a meal. It is at the night, area of conviviality and love, one says, that the French come into their own at table. Consider, one says, their way with fish and meats. And with soups. I admit soups. I doff my hat to the French there. A British soup is like a rain water seasoned with soot. No nation would have any trouble surpassing it.
Eggs? I admit the Gauls have a way with the omelette. I admit their excellence there, albeit it is rather on the frothy and frivolous side. And I acknowledge their artistry in all lighter concoctions, such as desserts. But these are the icings and the toppings and finishes of culture, not culture itself. French breads may be fine. But a slice of solid Dutch bread, with honest Dutch butter on it, is like a handsome solid island in the froth and foam of the sea of French crusts on breads and pastries.
If this be treason, make the most of it. It is high time somebody spoke out.
The trouble with Gallic meats is that they are pretty tasteless to start with. The meat “critters” lack the velvet of the British grass. They lack the fogs and the dews, makers of fine meat. They run to coarse and flavorless grain. No wonder the French have invented the world's most elaborate sauces. They had to, to hide the inferiority of their meats. Notice that the French word for beefsteak is English. The Frenchman admits the superiority of the English beef by that pathetic word—bifteck. The beef of old England! It is like the British Constitution. It is the meat that has built the British Empire and kept it inviolate against foreign invasion.
If there be any flavor or tenderness of texture in the universe to vie with an English mutton, fed on the juicy lawns of damp England, I don't know in what corner to look for it. Our lamb, sweetened by all the flowers of spring, is only a faint approximation to that adult mutton of England. The British have never had to doctor and disguise their mutton and beef with garlic and piquant and pungent sauces. Their meats are their own best sauces. Their fat is their fortune and their sauce. And plain Yorkshire pudding—which is an educated American flapjack—savored with the marrow and the fat of the meat itself, towers over all the Gallic garnishes in the encyclopedia of cookery.
I confess the British lack variety in vegetables. But, after all, what is a vegetable but grass? The British do run too much to bare potatoes and cabbage and Brussels sprouts. I recall especially that virulent purple cabbage that frequents allotment plots. People, apparently, eat such things.
The man who leans his weight on vegetables will find them a thin support to life, a hollow reed, a side dish. The man who puts his trust in them and leans his honest weight on them deserves to totter and crash to earth in his culture.
And, by the bye, the unsubtle English cultivate and cherish the very subtle leek. A cross between asparagus and green peas, it is one of the earth's most delicate and tender, creatures, as well as the national flower of Wales. Let the Gauls match that with onions sublimated by art if they can!
Yes, the British dinner, with its massive solidities of beef and mutton, and walled about with the heavy and hearty and saucy steamed puddings—which run as much in the blood of ancient American cookery as in the English—can hold its own among any French dinners there are.
But I am talking of breakfasts. If the French live for dinner at the end of the day, the English lift up their faces and their hearts and prepare for a day that sings, by putting their best foot forward, by staking their all, right at the start, right at the gates and the wings of the morning, by assembling the best meal the world knows, the British breakfast. Assembling is the word. There is a lot to it!
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.
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.