Firstly, hello and welcome to the inaugural Lecker Substack. It feels fitting that the first letter I’m sending here is about breakfast, the first meal of the day. Secondly, a bit of housekeeping. If you previously subscribed to the dormant tinyletter you are seeing this now in your inbox; if you would prefer not to receive these letters please scroll to the bottom and click Unsubscribe.
I believe you should never travel for a fry up. Although I’ve broken this rule occasionally over the course of my life, I think it’s why I’ve never had a favourite regular breakfast place, because there has never been one I really like close enough to my home. It is permissable, however, to borrow someone else’s local if you’re staying at theirs. I ate enough weekend breakfasts at Camberwell’s Jungle Grill (RIP), a short walk down Grove Lane from Michael’s old flat, that for a while they blu-tacked in the window a laminated printed photo featuring me and my friends to advertise their back garden.
I think the rule became entrenched as a child. I grew up first in the suburbs of a North East seaside town and then mostly in I guess what you would call a demi-rural village. I remember learning the word ‘conurbation’ at school and thinking that it applied so firmly, so neatly to Teesside that it might have been invented for it. Towns blurred and spilled into each other; Redcar into Eston into Middlesbrough into Stockton into Norton into Thornaby into Ingleby Barwick into Yarm. And then, they stopped, and that’s where the village was. It was far enough into the countryside that the Cleveland Hills rose unobscured in the distance and there were two buses a day, but close enough to urban life that no-one ever bothered to open any local businesses apart from a pub and a garage: the kind with a reliable mechanic, not the kind with a forecourt, pumps and shop. My parents moved there in the very early 90s, and although for a short while someone operated an honesty system newsagents out of a lean-to extension of their house, since then there has never been a shop or a café within the boundaries of the village.
That always seemed strange to me. Nowhere to pop out to pick up a pint of milk, or browse the sweets, or buy a magazine, have a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich. As a teenager I felt like there was some kind of void where the action should be happening, even if that action was just queueing for the NME within walking distance of my house. It’s much bigger now than the community it must have been when a church was first built there in the 12th century, as developers have bought farmers’ land around its edges and built dozens of houses. Apparently one of the conditions the developers weasled out of was supplying a corner shop along with the new builds; apparently they could “find no-one to run it.” My mum tells me this as we walk around the new houses while I’m visiting. It seems a very implausible reason to me but then I suppose I have never tried to run a shop here.
When I tell people I grew up in a village, even now, I think the image it conjures is one different to the reality of what I experienced. Life was peaceful, quiet, reserved. People got to know each other but also kept to themselves. It felt like they moved there for personal space rather than a close-knit community. We knew all of our neighbours, but we weren’t seamlessly in and out of each other’s houses. My mum and I got really into Emmerdale for a while and when I watched it, I thought, now THIS is a village. People up in each other’s business, eating sausage butties in the shop/post office/café. Although that establishment does seem to have attracted more than its fair share of fire damage, so maybe it’s not the most accurate baseline for comparison.
So, we didn’t go out for breakfast, because who wants to get in the car and drive who knows where for who knows how long before you’ve even had a whiff of toast? My small family had an organised, deeply domestic breakfast routine at home. Duralex tumblers of Tropicana, bowls of cereal, and cups of tea. We ate in the kitchen. Like the identical others on the street, the house had been built sometime between the late 70s and early 80s and had a little separate fitted kitchen next to the front door. There wasn’t room for a table but we always seemed to gravitate to the room for breakfast so my parents bought bar stools, allowing us to eat at the counter. There was obviously no room to put your legs underneath (we talked often about how next door had redone the kitchen and installed a BREAKFAST BAR) so you had to sit side-saddle while you spooned in muesli, or Shredded Wheat or whatever it was. When I went to sixth form I could get up later than my parents so no longer ate breakfast with them. They would make me a cup of tea when they made theirs, I would microwave it back to optimum temperature when I finally dragged myself out of bed.
Even now, my parents’ breakfast routine is set in stone. My dad painstakingly assembles home-made muesli, seed and chopped fruit bowls which you could probably charge close to a tenner for in a West London brunch spot. And it can’t be a coincidence that now I eat muesli every day for breakfast myself, bags and bags of the Sainsburys own brand ‘nutty’ one with yoghurt and a splash of milk. I don’t always want to eat this for breakfast but over time I’ve come to recognise that eating something you’re less than enthusiastic about but which you have immediately accessible in the house is preferable to being unable to decide what you should eat, and then suddenly you’re hollow and grumpy and it’s already 1pm. Going out for breakfast would involve an even more demanding chain of decision-making on an empty stomach: not just what to eat but also where to go.
Perhaps because it’s just never happened to me, I think there is something inherently very cool about being a breakfast regular somewhere. When I worked in a deli café in Brixton I had a vague unformed crush on a man who came in every week and ordered the same thing, to the point I would start making his coffee when he came through the door. We called him, imaginatively, ‘Mackerel Pâté’. Quite a bold breakfast choice, I always thought, although I was in the habit then of starting hungover shifts with a fully loaded toasted sandwich, probably with artichokes and chilli jam, so maybe I wasn’t best placed to judge. But to be a regular means you lay your cards on the table. You know what you like and when you like it, and you’re not afraid who knows it. Breakfast has always seemed private to me and the thought of someone not only intimately knowing my eating habits but also playing an active role in them is somehow uncomfortable.
When I was travelling recently any breakfast routine went mostly out of the window. In between bouts of daily churros/porros or huge slabs of yoghurt drenched in honey we bought cereal to eat with milk in the apartments we were staying in, perusing selections in supermarkets across Italy, Romania, Austria, Poland. It was surprisingly easy to maintain our habits from home, although we compromised on our usual selections and ended up buying muesli with small chunks of chocolate in, which seemed to be available everywhere, and sometimes had to dig around in the chilled section for non UHT milk. We noticed how in many places it came simply in branded bags, rather than the bag-in-branded-box set up most common in British supermarkets. Once, in Bulgaria, I enthusiastically misinterpreted the Cyrillic and bought Ayran instead of milk, which curdled dramatically in a flask of tea made for a long train journey.
The best breakfast I ate came from an unexpected source. We caught an early train from Bilbao to Madrid, leaving our hotel for the station at an hour that meant there were still people up from the night before and it was the kebab shops open rather than the cafés. It was a risk, turning up to a four hour journey spanning two mealtimes with no emergency provisions, but it paid off, as Rory came back from the buffet car with a perfect little menu for me. A toasted crusty white roll, a dolls house bottle of olive oil, perfectly seasoned tomato in a little foil packet, and, hidden underneath, a small packet of Iberico ham. Now all I have to do is secure access to decent tomatoes all year round and I can finally change my breakfast habits.
In The Lecker Guide to Breakfast, I spoke to seven people about their breakfast habits. Bre said her weekday breakfasts tended to be chaotic, but she could always count on weekend pancakes. Weetabix is a common feature of Lara’s mornings, wanting to get the day started without too much washing up, but weekends could include Tom Yum Bloody Marys and cheese and kimchi toasties. “Horrid” is how Thea describes her weekday breakfasts, but delicious childhood weekend breakfasts have left an impression on her. Gurdeep’s childhood breakfast memories involve his mum churning out parathas for a crowd and he makes a real effort for breakfast guests himself too. For Bettina, breakfast is whatever’s in the fridge, whether that’s a bowl of vegetables, or eggs on rice. For Kasia and Dan, a full fry up is something to be resorted to in emergencies only.
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