Name: Breakfast pie.
Appearance: An enigma wrapped in pastry.
What’s inside? Nobody knows. Although four and twenty blackbirds might be, possibly.
I love breakfast and I love pie. Now you’re telling me some genius has put them together. Madness! Where can I get one? You can’t.
That is the most disappointing news in the history of news. Why not? Because breakfast pies exist chiefly in the mind of the New York Times reporter who wrote that anglophile Americans dined on traditional British fare – scones, scotch eggs and breakfast pies, all washed down with a non-alcoholic mimosa-like cocktail called buck’s fizz – to celebrate King Charles’s coronation.
What did sarcastic Brits tweet after reading this? “On the morning after a coronation I always eat an entire breakfast pie,” wrote @michaelglasper, while @carausius added: “I have mine brought to me by cockney urchins in caps and little white scarves.”
Didn’t Americans invent Google? Couldn’t they have checked this farrago of fiction? You’d think.
Doesn’t buck’s fizz have champagne in it? Yes.
Otherwise it’s just orange juice. That’s true.
And champagne is alcoholic. These are all good points.
Back to my favourite words – breakfast and pie. Did the New York Times correct its errors? Yes, the reference to breakfast pie was removed to head off diplomatic incidents, pie riots, etc.
Talk about telling truth to power. But some American nonsense did remain in print? Sadly, yes. As someone tweeted: “The words ‘dined’ and ‘scotch eggs’ should never, ever, be in the same sentence. Ever.”
True that. But if breakfast pie doesn’t exist, can’t we invent it? After all, everything is improved by being wrapped in pastry. In fact, the chef Chris Kennedy is way ahead of you. For National Pie Week in 2017 he briefly put a breakfast pie on the menu at the Woodstock Arms brasserie near Oxford. It included layered tomato, baked beans, black pudding, bacon, fried egg and HP gravy, packed into pastry, with a side of HP gravy for dipping.
And still Kennedy hasn’t been knighted. Not to be outdone, the Swindon-based food stylist Lesley Holdship has created the Borough Market breakfast pie, whose online recipe includes mushrooms as well as other traditional fry-up ingredients, although disappointingly favours tomato ketchup over HP Sauce.
Do say: “Isn’t breakfast pie a dainty dish to set before the king?”
Don’t say: “I actually prefer quiche for breakfast, ideally with spinach, broad beans and tarragon.”
