A MEAL OF GREAT IMPORTANCE

El Bulli’s Ferran Adrià talks to Joanna Taylor about the ritual of breakfast

How do you like your eggs in the morning? I like mine with a… actually, I don’t. I’m more partial to the typical French breakfast: a warm, buttery, flake-all-over-the-place croissant, a wincingly tart orange juice and a coffee — hold the cigarette. Although what I’ve come to understand is that I shouldn’t hazard a guess as to how you take yours, because depending on almost every detail about you — from your birthplace to job, sleeping habits to, of course, taste buds — your answer will likely differ from mine.

According to ex-El Bulli restaurateur and creator of the El Bulli Foundation, Ferran Adrià, there are more than four billion ways to indulge in the morning ritual, and his team’s new book Italian Breakfast is dedicated to exploring them. ‘We realised that there were so many books about breakfast recipes, but none about breakfast as a concept in sociological, anthropological and economic terms,’ he says. A collaboration between the Bullipedia team and coffee powerhouse Lavazza, the encyclopedic-style tome looks into every aspect of the morning ritual with a ‘sapiens’ methodology, developed by the El Bulli Foundation to research gastronomic topics. ‘It’s a methodology that aims to connect knowledge,’ says Adrià. Through a combination of essays, graphs, mind maps, imagery, dictionary entries and expert opinion, Adrià says ‘we’re asking and connecting questions such as: What is breakfast? How is breakfast interrelated around the world? And with what other areas does breakfast engage in dialogue?’

The result is 416 pages of theory and history covering the subject all over the planet, but honing in on the many different and intriguing styles of dining you’ll find in Italy — from leberwurst on toast in Trentino-Alto Adige to scaddateddi doughnuts in Calabria — because ‘it wouldn’t be possible to cover all of the breakfasts in the world’.

Whether you consider breakfast to be the most important meal of the day or not, pick up a copy of this coffee table companion for dinner party conversation (did you know that more Italians prefer a cigarette with their morning coffee than fruit?), a deep dive into how Breakfast at Tiffany’s has had its say, and arresting collages by design company Toiletpaper. Though beware: stomach rumbles are inevitable.

‘Italian Breakfast’, by El Bulli Foundation, £100 (Phaidon)