Melanie McDonagh

The young are missing out on a proper breakfast

What could be better than a handsome sausage?

  • From Spectator Life
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More proof, if it were needed, of the gastronomic generation gap. It seems one in ten young persons has never had a full English/Irish/whatever cooked breakfast and one in five only has it once a year. They are, of course, missing out on one of the pleasures of life. The cooked breakfast and afternoon tea are, with pudding, the great contribution of these islands to food.

As to what constitutes a good breakfast, I refer you to what I consider the perfect cookery book: The Cookery Year, published by the Reader’s Digest in the 1970s. There, Theodora Fitzgibbon, a wonderful Irish food writer, briskly summarises it thus:

Porridge or cornflakes may be followed by fried bacon and eggs, with sausage, tomatoes and mushrooms.

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