Breakfast

The British playwright Somerset Maugham once said that ‘to eat well in England you should eat breakfast three times a day’. I think he meant it as a jibe, but we should take it as a compliment. Our breakfast is as powerfully evocative of England as any part of our cultural heritage. In The Lion and the Unicorn, stirred to patriotism amid the country’s daily bombardment in the Blitz, George Orwell opined that English civilisation was ‘somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes. It has a flavour of its own’. That flavour is of sizzling bacon, straight from

Eggs benedict is, I think, the perfect brunch dish. It combines the best bits of breakfast – eggs, some kind of pig product, a good sauce and bread – with sufficient elegance and composure that it doesn’t feel weird to be eating it after 10am. Although it is the balance of the individual components that make it such a successful dish, that hasn’t stopped restaurants and chefs the world over creating a host of variations. Swap the ham for smoked salmon to turn it into Eggs Royale, or spinach for Eggs Florentine. These are probably the best known variations on the benedict classic, but that’s only the beginning: Eggs Chesapeake