Mabel and Malcolm's Three Course Breakfast

Nom Nom Nom

The Cookery School

15a Little Portland Street

Fitzrovia

WC1

by Malcolm Eggs and Mabel Syrup from The London Review of Breakfasts

At the turn of the twentieth century, with the follies of Empire at their most decadent, breakfast would often run into three courses and far beyond. What we now call the "full English" is just a pale echo of those heady, gouty times.

Given the opportunity to cook a three course meal we pledged to shrug off such modern twaddle and make a 21st-century three course breakfast that could be enjoyed but not at the risk of an early heart attack (or whatever is supposed to happen to you if you eat too many eggs, salt, alcohol units, baby basil leaves, &c). Our vision combined the healthy, the bacon-and-eggy and the europeany.

Course one:

Homemade granola, or just "crunch" as we've come to call it, is a Syrup family speciality. It tastes wonderful with a bit of Greek yoghurt and the crunch jar often attracts longing gazes late at night, long after the correct hour for granola has passed.

You might think a load of nuts and oats would make a nice cheap breakfasting option and maybe it would have done, had we not bought the ingredients from those latter day highwaymen at Fresh & Wild, the shylocks. As this was a special occasion we also introduced a raspberry coulis. The resulting crunch bowls went down surprisingly well at the post-cooking feast, so maybe we should rethink what we mean when we say "the correct hour for granola" or just expunge the phrase altogether.

Course two:

We called this 'Malcolm and Mabel's Full English' but we'd only ever cooked it once before, in what we referred to as a dress rehearsal but was really just an excuse to have more breakfasts. That day we spent hours faffing around in Stoke Newington Farmers' market, loitering around his holiness the mushroom man, meeting friends for coffee, trying on waistcoats in a vintage clothes shop and baking granola. ‘Breakfast’ wasn’t until after 6pm.

A Full English isn't a feat of culinary genius - it's just about cooking nice ingredients for the right amount of time - but it does taste amazing and can also send a fellow's dopamine glands into fits of industriuosness. That's why it's so aggravating when restaurants get it wrong, as they so often do.

The breakfast itself consisted of sausages, bacon, fried potatoes with spinach and onions, mushrooms, roast cherry tomatoes and a fried egg. The sausages and bacon were from the Ginger Pig. We found everything else in Marylebone Farmers' Market (and not Tesco, oh no, we would never do such a thing).

We didn't see the judges try the finished product (although we are fairly certain it was stone cold), but next to all the succulent samples at the Nom Nom Nom teams' feast, our bowl of bacon looked primitive and incongruous, like a neolithic man in a hat made for Ascot.

Course three:

We were first introduced to the idea that Portuguese custard tarts make a sweet riposte to bacon-and-eggness at the original Konstam cafe in King's Cross, which closed a while back.

Given the G4-(who? exactly.)esque blandness of our first vanilla custard experiment some weeks back, it was for the best that Mabel stumbled across an authentic Portuguese demonstration which we could mimic (Malcolm hummed the music in our version):

These were a triumph. Even the ultra cooking lady who ran the school itself seemed impressed.

So that was that. We had a splendid day, met some lovely people and entered a fry-up into a gourmet cooking competition (such japes!). Thanks to all. Better go now, it's almost midnight. Time for breakfast.

Kitchen

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