by
Aug 17. 2024
Full English Breakfast
Recipe: My version of a fry-up
Serves 1
Preparation time 10 minutes
Cooking time less than 30 minutes
Ingredients 1 sausage/ 2 slices of bacon/ a handful of tomatoes/ a handful of mushrooms/ 80g tinned baked beans/ 1 medium sized egg/ 1 slice of bread/ 1 tbsp vegetable oil (15ml)
1 Pierce the sausage with a knife and cook it in a large pan over a medium heat with a little bit of oil, turning over regularly. After around 15 minutes, add the bacon and cook them together. (The sausage needs to be cooked the longest.)
2 While the meat is cooking, warm the beans in a small saucepan over a low heat, stirring occasionally. Make sure they don’t boil.
3 In another pan, fry the egg and then remove it from the pan. Fry the mushrooms and tomatoes in a little bit of oil until brown and caramelised.
4 Put the sliced bread into the toaster and make a cup of coffee. Once the sausage and bacon are cooked, take them out of the pan.
5 Arrange the well-cooked sausage, bacon, mushrooms, tomatoes, egg and baked beans together on a large plate, and serve with the toast on a side plate and your cup of coffee.
I think a proper full English breakfast, also called a fry-up, is about cooking with ingredients selected according to your own personal taste. Feel free to swap in or out what you like best, you don’t need to stick to just the traditional fry-up ingredients. I cook it with different vegetables, such as aubergine, courgette, onion, cabbage, or different varieties of mushrooms and tomatoes depending on what is in my fridge.
My other half is sometimes especially sweet at the weekend and takes care of all the meals. He will often choose to make a full English breakfast because the recipe is quite simple, and we can choose a variety of ingredients, depending on what we have available. It's great for brunch ahead of a busy day.
The key to preparing this breakfast is multitasking. The cooking should be completed all together; it doesn’t need special techniques but you need to manage each ingredient quickly and at the same time. I had difficulty cooking this meal because I’m like a sloth in the kitchen. When my other half is a butler at the weekend, you can see his cooking skills, he uses a pan, a saucepan, airfryer and toaster all at the same time. He cooks the sausage in the airfryer for 10 minutes, turns it over and cooks it again for another 10 minutes. He warms the baked beans in the saucepan, frying the eggs, bacon and tomatoes with some cabbage in the pan. When he has almost finished all the cooking, he prepares the toast and coffee. I do not go near the devastated kitchen for a while after the 20 minutes or so of war-like cooking. I just want to enjoy the beautiful fry-up.
When you come to eat it, spread some butter on the toast and cut it into small pieces. Cut all the other ingredients into bite-sized pieces, put a mixture of the small sized items onto the toast and take a bite. You will see why people love a full English breakfast so much. You will also understand why it has become a favourite breakfast among workers - it fills you up.
I generally prefer vegetables but I have to eat meat because the weekend chef enjoys it. If you have sage in your garden you can add it when you fry the sausage in the pan. Sage removes the meaty odour and adds a herbal scent to the sausage, so it improves its flavour. Many sausages in the UK are made with sage for this reason. I often include black pudding in the breakfast but on this occasion there were already a lot of meaty ingredients so I skipped it.
Black pudding is made from pork or occasionally beef blood and fat, with pork fat or beef suet and a high proportion of cereal such as oatmeal, oat groats or barley groats mixed with certain herbs inside a kind of sausage skin. Black pudding usually uses cellulose skin instead of animal intestines and a higher proportion of cereal and herbs than animal blood or fat nowadays. Black pudding is eaten like fried dumplings by adding oil to a pan and cooking it. It is like Korean sun-dae but it uses cereal and herbs in place of noodles and vegetables. To explain simply, it is a sausage made from animal blood and cereal. Black pudding has been a dish developed to avoid wasting precious ingredients before the development of refrigeration and distribution facilities. By making a pudding with the blood of an animal during slaughter, the meat would not spoil as quickly and the blood would not be wasted.
source: https://www.instagram.com/p/C55bqfqC28sA full Scottish breakfast uses haggis, which is made in a similar way to black pudding but has different fillings. It's crafted by blending sheep's heart, lungs and liver with a medley of grains, vegetables and spices, then stuffing the mixture into the sheep's stomach to be cooked. Nowadays, it's mostly cooked in a synthetic sausage casing. Haggis is also known as a mythical animal that lives in the Scottish Highlands. When I was preparing for my holiday to Scotland, I read a humorous post on Instagram and it left me open-mouthed. “Be very careful because the wild haggis is particularly dangerous this season…”, I laughed out loud at the extremely detailed and lengthy danger warning written along with the photo.
Food cooked by someone else is the most delicious. Particularly in summer, I think a lot of people won’t want to cook everyday including the weekends. If you are lucky enough to have a lovely weekend butler, or maybe you are the butler, I recommend this meal. As you can see from my explanation above, this recipe doesn’t need many skills and the preparation time is short. If you can use some frying pans, or you like juggling, it is perfect.
Breakfast means breaking the fasting period of the previous night and the word came into use in written English to describe a morning meal. The original breakfasts of the aristocracy were centred around local meat and fish produced on their estates. The full breakfast in its current form appeared in the 19th century, and is a simplified version of that country breakfast. The ingredients were affordable to the middle classes and it could be prepared and eaten in a shorter period of time, before a day's work. The full English breakfast reached its highest popularity in Edwardian Britain, and despite a decline following the food shortages of World War II, new technologies of food storage and preparation allowed it to become common for the working class in the 1950s. This style of breakfast was brought over by Irish and British immigrants to the United States and Canada, where it is still popular.
This breakfast can also be called a fry-up since nearly all the ingredients are prepared by frying. The various ‘full breakfasts’ of the United Kingdom are so-called because they are well and truly full of different ingredients: An all day English breakfast, full breakfast (often "full English breakfast"), full Scottish, full Welsh, Ulster fry, fry-up… all have their own names depending on the region and the ingredients included. A common traditional full breakfast typically includes bacon, sausages, eggs, baked beans, tomatoes, mushrooms, toast, jam or marmalade with coffee or tea. Hash browns are a modern addition.
(I refer to Wikipedia)
source: https://www.thespruceeats.com/what-is-a-full-breakfast-435324