Early Starts & Late Starts - Breakfast & Brunch

Appears in
Lavender & Lovage: A Culinary Notebook of Memories & Recipes From Home & Abroad

By Karen Burns-Booth

Published 2019

  • About

It seems that all my life, the start of the day, no matter how early or late, has included the best meals of the day. Indeed, there is a magical ring to the word breakfast and, more recently, the portmanteau word for breakfast and lunch, brunch, with its visions of savoury and sweet recipes that include favourite ingredients of mine such as bacon, eggs, oats, berries, fresh fruit and cheese. We are all told to “breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and have supper like a pauper” and I think there is an element of truth to that age-old adage as regards digestion and breaking the nightly fast. Unfortunately with the frenetic lifestyles we all seem to live now, that old saying has been turned on its head, and we are more likely to skip breakfast than eat it. For me there is a wonderful relaxation about the first meal of the day, the stretching of toes in fluffy socks as you reach across the table to butter another slice of toast and anoint it with homemade marmalade. Even when I worked in London and did the deadly commute, I always set my alarm 15 to 20 minutes earlier so that I could sit down for breakfast.