Rise and shine... breakfast is back on a roll
How the key meal of the day got trendier
IT’S the colours – the gold of yolk, the pink of bacon, the glisten of mushroom; it’s the big bold flavours, from tangy marmalade to luscious sausage – but mostly, first thing in the morning, it’s the joy of all the textures.
The crunch of toast and the ooze of butter. The cold citrus hit of juice, the comforting warmth of tea, the mush of baked beans, the yielding, acidulous squishiness of tomato…
And for years, too many years, we have basely neglected what nutritionists have long told us is the most important meal of the day. We dash out the door for the 8.16 choo-choo on no more than a slug of instant, making the office with eyes like burnt-out rock cakes.
Too many of us don’t even get it down our children’s necks these days. Says one headmaster, the first question he puts to miscreants presented at his door is: ‘Have you eaten today?’ In most instances they haven’t.
Well, breakfast is back. Big and bold and brash and beautiful – and the height of fashion. The pleasant cafes popping up everywhere usually offer an all-day version with toast, juice and hot beverage included.
No wonder 70 per cent of Scots report tucking in to breakfast, bucking a trend that sees two in five Britons skipping the meal, compared with one in five in 2012.
The worst offenders are in North-East England and Northern Ireland, where only around half have breakfast each day. But in Scotland, though lunch has declined, it’s becoming increasingly fashionable to meet a friend for a tasty morning repast.
Even a decade ago that would have seemed weird and rather American. Now, in Britain, we’re spending some £76million a year breakfasting out.
What’s more, it’s cheap. A very filling, nutritionally balanced meal can be had for less than a tenner. And, of course, it saves you the fag of making it yourself – a doddle if you have an Aga, or similar range cooker, but calling for serious choreography if you don’t.
Still more important are your ingredients. There is nowhere for the cheap and nasty to hide at oh-gosh-o’clock of a morning.
Pallid, runny battery eggs, bacon reared on fish meal that oozes grey in the pan, beans that are not by Heinz, horrid black pudding that is not from Stornoway, limp and tragic white pan loaf toast – get ye hence from our morning.
‘Breakfast has gone to a completely new level since I arrived in the UK ten years ago,’ says Clerkenwell Boy, an Australian blogger famous for his online snaps of eating out in London. ‘People are now looking forward to breakfast as a key meal and a chance to enjoy fantastic food. You’re also seeing a great juxtaposition of cultures celebrated through breakfast.’
Some of the tweaking is as camp as Christmas. At London’s Duck and Waffle, you can kick-start your day on crispy duck leg, mustard maple syrup and waffles. A joint in Brighton offers frozen plum juice, slowcooked eggs and ‘activated-grain porridge’.
Cinnamon toast, noodles washed down with sake, berry compote and crème fraiche, bacon naan rolls, marmalade margaritas, espresso martinis… you name it, someone, somewhere, is feeding it to hipsters at half past eight of a morning.
But for most of us, the classic cooked breakfast – known, variously, as the full English, full Scottish or the heart-attack-on-a-plate – is indulgence enough.
They go a step further across the Irish Sea. The Ulster fry, boast of the Six Counties, ‘consists of one or two eggs, a few rashers of bacon, two or three slices of fried bread,’ coos travel writer Robin Neillands in Walking Through Ireland. ‘A sausage or two, maybe three – perhaps even a chop, soda bread soaked in fat and anything else that happens to be lying out in the kitchen… there is a certain pride in the knowledge that Northern Ireland has the highest rate of death from heart disease in Europe.’
The long fuss over animal fats and cholesterol certainly knocked the full Scottish for six. But there were other factors.
Most wives and mothers now work, for instance. Continental holidays converted millions not just to duvets but to such simple morning repasts as milky coffee and a roll. And, with TV and social media, most of us now retire to bed much later and arise in rather a dash. That is a pity because breakfast really matters.
According to nutritionist and food writer Dale Pinnock: ‘After a full night’s sleep, our body calls out for nutrition. Get your breakfast right and it will really set you up for the day. Get it wrong and it will set you up for a day of hunger attacks, energy dips and, in the long term, an ever-expanding waistline.’
Yet many of us never breakfast at all and, for 80 per cent of those who do, the fast is broken only with processed cereal and a slosh of milk. Unfortunately, unlike good old porridge or a traditional fry-up, the Krispie Krunchies or whatever play havoc with your blood sugar. In a couple of hours you will feel both lethargic and hungry – and reach for the chocolate biscuits.
Porridge, proper porridge made with oatmeal, is incredibly good for you. Mr Pinnock enthuses: ‘The carbohydrates in porridge get released into your body much slower than those in processed cereals, thanks in part to the food’s high fibre content. Porridge keeps your blood sugar levels sustained and appetite regulated for longer.’
But not everyone likes porridge, or has the knack of making it. And, unexpectedly, experts then sing the praise of protein.
Recent and repeated research has established that, contrary to myth, the classic cooked breakfast is really good for you.
According to a 2013 study in the journal Obesity, a breakfast rich in protein – eggs, bacon, beans – vastly boosts production of a hormone called PYY. This is the body chemical that makes you feel full. Not only do we make a lot more of it after the full Scottish but it stays high for hours.
That was borne out by experts writing in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2013, who found that: ‘A protein-based breakfast not only increased satiety for long periods of time but also resulted in a marked reduction in snacking throughout the day and also led to better food choices and fewer calories being consumed at lunch and dinner.
‘Such findings support the notion that a protein-based breakfast is better not only for keeping you going but also for managing weight in the long term.’
In the past year there has at last been general admission that all those warnings over the decades about animal fats in your diet were just plain wrong.
Fifty studies involving more than a million people found not a scrap of evidence that saturated fats are bad for you. University of Cambridge research suggests that dairy fat, especially, seems to reduce your risk of diabetes.
In a paper published by the British Medical Journal in March last year, Dr James DiNicol antonio – one of the world’s leading cardiologists – stated categorically that diets low in saturated fat do not lower cholesterol, prevent heart disease or help people live longer.
Indeed, he went further. ‘A change in recommendations is drastically needed as public health could be at risk. We need a public health campaign as strong as the one we had in the 70s and 80s demonising saturated fats, to say that we got it wrong.’
And Professor Brian Ratcliffe of Aberdeen’s Robert Gordon University pointed out dryly that diets very low in fat are associated strongly with poor mood and depression.
Launch your morning, then, with abandon. Crack open your eggs, sizzle your sausages, spread good wholegrain toast with honest butter. As celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain put it: ‘What nicer thing can you do for somebody than make them breakfast?’
‘Crispy duck legs, mustard maple syrup and waffles’
‘What nicer thing can you do for somebody?’