Red Sauce Brown Sauce: A British Breakfast Odyssey

Description

The charming and joyful follow-up book from 'the nation's taster in chief,' Felicity Cloake. If there's one thing that truly unites this country from Aberdeen to Abernethy, St Ives to St Pancras, it's an obsession with breakfast. We all have an opinion on the merits of brown sauce versus ketchup on our morning sandwich. No other country's culinary identity is so bound up with breakfast - the French may love their croissants, the Chinese their congee, but they're rarely held up as national symbols in the same way as a Full English, an Ulster fry or a bowl of porridge. A good breakfast is our birth right, eaten with as much relish in the Wolsey on Piccadilly as in Terry's Caff in Borough. In this eagerly anticipated follow up to One More Croissant for the Road, Felicity Cloake sets off on an epic bike ride round Britain to celebrate and investigate the legendary Great British Breakfast. She rates fry-ups on criteria from the crispness of the bacon to how long they keep her pedalling and stops for fact-based tea-breaks in place of last time's pause cafe. And a woman cannot live by All Day Breakfast alone, so as well as recipes for things like Omelette Arnold Bennett or proper porridge, she will report back on the delights of regional specialities she encounters along the way, from Lancashire hotpot to Welsh cakes, Balti to boxty and everything else that takes her fancy en route. All washed down with tea, naturally. From the less celebrated breakfast items that often cause puzzlement to visitors abroad - baked beans on toast, for example, or Marmite or Weetabix - to the homely foods of different communities, the halwa puris and Polish rye breads, grilled plantain and century eggs, Felicity will take them all in. Her mission is to eat all the best breakfasts of Britain - whether a crumpet hot from the factory production line in Enfield or a desi breakfast in Birmingham or even a pease pudding stottie cake from the original Greggs in Gosforth, this will be a true tour of Britain. And Britain is a country that runs on breakfast.

Felicity Cloake is the author of the Guardian's long-running weekly column, How to Cook the Perfect...as well as having been the New Statesman's food columnist since 2011 and the author of four books with Fig Tree. She was named Cookery Journalists of the Year at the 2016 Fortnum & Mason awards, and won the Cookery Journalist of the Year and New Media trophies at the 2011 Guild of Food Writers awards. One More Croissant for the Road is Felicity's first piece of food and travel writing.

'As a greedy woman who loves cycling around the country in search of double and even triple breakfasts, I was delighted by this book about a greedy woman, cycling around the countryside, looking for several square meals a day. In an era when too many fully grown adults munch through instant microwave oats, overpackaged biscuits or simply skip eating altogether, Cloake is making the case for a cooked, regional, calorie-packed kick off, both as a treat for your senses and as a way of supporting smaller, traditional food producers...funny, enlightening and evocative.' Nell Frizzell, The Guardian 'A bible for breakfast lovers.' The Scotsman Praise for 'One More Croissant for the Road' 'Joyful, life-affirming, greedy. I loved it.' Diana Henry 'Wonderfully written.' Anna Jones 'Felicity Cloake's Tour de France is a triumph. It is full of greed and wit, jam packed with priceless practical information, and peppered with a sense of adventure and wonder. I love it.' Yotam Ottolenghi 'From start to finish, this book is a joy: the perfect antidote to a world of diets and bad news.' Bee Wilson