Red Sauce Brown Sauce: A British Breakfast Odyssey

"This is by Felicity Cloake, who regularly writes about food and is also an incredibly accomplished cookery writer. She does “How to Cook the Perfect…” column in the Guardian . In this book, she goes on a culinary odyssey around Britain in search of the perfect breakfast. She eats every breakfast that comes in her path: porridge, oatcakes, crumpets, the full English, the Ulster breakfast, kedgeree, kippers. You name it, she ate it. She explores the differences and the controversies. The book is peppered with little snippets of food history about different breakfast items. It has recipes as well—for example, there’s a recipe for an Arnold Bennett omelet. She cycles from place to place. Various of her friends join her along the way, and then peel off again. Sometimes she’s on her own, sometimes she’s with a mate. It is so beautifully her. She imbues it with her incredibly warm, very funny, smart, wry but bubbling personality. By the end of it, you don’t just want to be her friend, you feel like you are her friend. You also learn an awful lot and it’s such a nice way of learning. I’m a cyclist myself and it is an incredible way of exploring a country’s culinary landscape because you are always hungry. You can eat so much more. You just eat loads. I read her book about croissants too . That was her first cycling food book, about cycling the length of France. I really ate and read and cycled with her. It’s a very satisfying way of traveling. It’s just the perfect lens through which to explore food. Yes, you see it through a cyclist’s eyes. Cycling is an incredible way to explore food and to explore landscape. It makes for incredible writing because it’s as if you’re looking over Felicity’s handlebars. Yes, and she really cares passionately about it. She has little stats at the end of each chapter on the number of breakfasts she’s had with red sauce and the number with brown sauce. There are also little quotes from people she’s interviewed along the way saying whether they prefer red sauce or brown sauce. The slightly ironical theme that runs throughout the book is that Felicity is neither a red sauce nor a brown sauce person, she likes mustard. She doesn’t really go for either (although she does in the end). She also uncovers how relatively new some of these breakfast traditions are. The full English is barely 100 years old, whereas porridge and the associated oat-related breakfasts are far, far older as a tradition."