The World's Most Popular Breakfast

The bacon must be lean; crispy but certainly not incinerated. The egg yolk should be runny but white sealed and without pools of what comes from a docker's nose. The tomato should, on no account, be from a tin and therefore not be a tomato. The sausage should, like the bacon, be reasonably well done and not be pink inside. The beans' sauce should not have acquired a glutenous state.

I am, you might realise, somewhat fastidious when it comes to the full English. I don't mind confessing both that I demand high standards and that I actually eat full Englishes. They are a guilty pleasure. Firstly, because it is claimed that they aren't necessarily good for you (I'd dispute this). Secondly, because consuming the full English is being oh so British. I should eschew the bacon 'n' eggs in favour of going-native breakfasting, which means the ensaïmada. Sorry, but if I'm going to have any lard, I want it with sausage and not in the form of a twirly thing with a sugar coating. The ensaïmada is rubbish. Over sweet, over hyped and over here.

It is a short pastry step from the execrable ensaïmada to the puffed-up contortion of the croissant. The two are dough to the pretentious fellow travellers of anything but the full English. And neither is any good.

The croissant is not originally French, but French it has become. Because it is French, as with anything else that can be noshed or imbibed that has a French label, the French would claim it to be superior to anything from anywhere else. Such culinary jingoism makes it the more surprising, therefore, that the French themselves have placed the full anglais in the number-one position on the breakfast chart.

A poll by Hotels.com has revealed that 19% of French people rate the full English as being number one. The survey of 2,400 travellers from more than 20 countries in all finds that the F.E. is the most popular first meal of the day.

The breakfasting habits of different nationalities can be hard to comprehend. The Dutch are arguably the maddest of all. Whatever made them think that putting little bits of chocolate onto bread and butter was a good thing? Probably the same thought process that has led them to eating raw herrings. They simply have no idea. Yet the Dutch, giants that they are, should thoroughly enjoy getting stuck into a full English. As should the Germans and the Scandinavians, and most obviously the Danes who, rather than eating Danish bacon, export most of it to the UK.

The discovery that the full English is in fact the world's number one breakfast should come as no surprise, as it quite obviously is the best, and should cause Bar Brits across Mallorca to stop and think for a moment.

The much-spoken-of gastronomy of Mallorca is naturally enough Mallorcan, but some of it, the ensaïmada clearly, is lousy. Both the lousy and the not lousy gets itself a fair amount of the spotlight, but what of the gastronomy that isn't Mallorcan?

One of the most bizarre reasons I have heard as to why a restaurant should not advertise was one offered by an Italian restaurant. People don't come to Mallorca to eat Italian food was the argument. If this is so, then it begs a pretty fundamental question as to why the restaurant exists.

The argument was rubbish, because "Italian" has its own power to promote and to attract. So why not, therefore, "British" or "English"? Because of the association with Bar Brit and consequently with tattoos, bellies, white-turning-pink skin and Sky, this gastronomy is ignored. Yet, it can boast the best breakfast in the world, one that can come in different varieties. It could be, for instance, the grand full English, that which might be served at Simpson's-in-the-Strand (nearly twenty quid for the real thing or "the ten deadly sins" to include also kidneys and bubble and squeak). It could come with accompanying Guinness - in a bottle and not out of some peculiar can with a syrup. It could be promoted as the "world's most popular breakfast".

Bar Brits could co-operate in pushing a gastronomy fair of their own, directed at the nationalities who come to Mallorca (and who also live here) and who are unaware of the great British fry-up. They could educate as to quite why a bean has been covered in a tomatoey sauce; advance the cause of the black pudding which isn't, after all, that far removed from local sausages about which a song and dance is made.

The world's most popular breakfast. Now get frying.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.