Fresh start

Breakfast is one meal where you can afford to chew the fat. Preparing and enjoying a country feast will do you good in all manner of ways

Breakfast is one meal where you can afford to chew the fat. Preparing and enjoying a country feast will do you good in all manner of ways

There is something incredibly routine and yet a little ceremonious about breakfast. Perhaps this is because it’s prefaced by a sleep-induced fast and broken by the robotic ritual of rising, followed by a series of never-changing hoops that get us down the stairs and out the door. Lack of food overnight gives us an appetite like no other mealtime.

Breakfast also showcases our unique eating habits and is generally the only meal of the day where we are non-negotiable on the menu – one that hardly ever changes. It may be nothing more than inflexible routine, but if your daily drill is tea and toast it’s likely you won’t do coffee and cereal on alternate days. Personally, I cannot move without tea in the morning and I routinely take it strong, with milk and, wait for it, three heaped spoonfuls of sugar. Hardly the beverage of a foodie, but it takes two cups to raise me and it has been the same every morning for more than 30 years.

Sunrise menus tend to have a healthier bias than lunch or dinner, probably to do with the clean slate that we surface with and our need to resolve internal differences as much as diet. Too often (because of over-indulgence the night before) we fool ourselves with the idea that herbal tea and horse-chaff with tasteless skim yoghurt and fruit sweetened with fake sugar will make up for other bad eating habits.

For children, breakfast is the only meal where they have any jurisdiction over the menu (albeit a small freedom), an allowance that is vetoed at other meals. I grew up on a farm and we had a chook pen in the backyard, as well as neighbours who made their own butter and cream. Our breakfasts were delicious, leisurely affairs with an abundant table of fresh hen’s eggs, rashers of thickly cut bacon and black pudding made by my dad. On weekends, we were allowed to have bread with butter as thick as cheese and lashings of jam and fresh cream dribbled over the top. To this day, there’s no doubt that a country-style jam-and-bread breakfast brings a romanticism to the table that slimmer’s muesli and skimmed foods can’t.

At every opportunity I still opt for a real breakfast of eggs (boiled, scrambled or fried), smoky butcher’s bacon and thick French toast smothered with fresh strawberries. It’s not just the wholesomeness of the food I love, but the preparation as well. Breakfast can happily be prepared by more than one person in the kitchen. It saddens me that most city slickers start their day solo with soulless fat-free food, or worse, skip the meal altogether. The only time many allow themselves to get smoochy at breakfast is when they’re on holiday or on the odd splash-out at weekends.

The respite from boring breakfasts has been led by our own Crown Prince of Pancakes: Bill Granger of bills cafes in Sydney. He has made breakfast chic again by bridging the gap between weekday and weekend menus for city dwellers. There is a wisdom in his middle ground. Breakfast, as cliched as it sounds, is the most important meal of the day. It is the one meal where you can afford to let your hair down to some extent and have a greater intake of calories, safe in the knowledge you have an entire day to burn off that extra scrape of butter or slab of toast.