Halfway through reading Red Sauce Brown Sauce, I cycled 6km to a fishmonger’s on an industrial estate, between a Hertz car hire centre and a T-shirt printer’s, to buy a tin of laverbread. What can I say? I’m susceptible. Felicity Cloake’s description of cycling from Falmouth to Gowerton – from hog’s pudding HQ in Cornwall to a seaweed-rich estuary of south-west Wales – made me jealous. Not that hers was an entirely painless journey. Early on, Cloake falls awkwardly into a stream near Bath, and so undertakes much of her odyssey with a wrecked hamstring, as well as the usual weariness, saddle ache and frustrating diversions on to thundering roads familiar to anyone who has ever cycled fairly long distances in Britain.
Her book is, put simply, a quest for the great British breakfast. 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. Like One More Croissant for the Road before it, in which Cloake cycled around France, Red Sauce Brown Sauce is as much a travel book as it is a piece of food writing. The descriptions of riding through open fields in search of a mustard factory, touring the unlikely Baked Bean Museum in a block of flats in Port Talbot and crossing the causeway to Holy Island in the chapter about stottie cakes are by turns funny, enlightening and evocative.
