Name: Breakfast barbecues.
Age: Our ancestors cooked with fire at least 780,000 years ago; they must have done it in the morning at some point.
Appearance: A bit burnt, probably.
What kind of breakfast can you cook on a barbecue? A full English breakfast.
Who does that? According to a recent survey, 16% of Britons have cooked bacon and eggs on a barbecue.
Why? Because of power cuts? It’s unclear.
How would it even work? Wouldn’t the eggs fall through the bars of the grill? Again, that’s unclear. Presumably some kind of intermediating pan or griddle is involved.
Then it’s not true barbecuing. Perhaps not.
And the scorched result wouldn’t be a true full English, in my opinion. The English Breakfast Society agrees with you.
Good. Sorry, the what? The English Breakfast Society. Its chair described the barbecued full English as “deeply wrong”.
Chair? Guise Bule de Missenden, to give him his full English name. He calls the dish “a proper sit-down meal that deserves a bit of ceremony. Not the smoky, feral chaos of a barbecue.”
I confess I was not aware of this organisation. It’s a non-profit fellowship “dedicated to the history and heritage of the traditional English breakfast”, according to the website.
A pressure group fighting against innovation and improvement? Not at all – last year, it recommended adding grilled pineapple to the full English for “variety”.
Sorry, the plate is full. Bule suggested swapping out the tomato or the mushroom to make room.
Sacrilege. Who put these people in charge? On the other hand, the EBS previously opposed the encroachment of hash browns on to the full English roster.
I like hash browns. It wanted them to be replaced by the more traditional bubble and squeak.
I support their campaign in spirit, if not in practice. Full English debates have raged online for years – you can always start an argument simply by suggesting that the baked beans should, or shouldn’t, be quarantined in a ramekin.
I prefer the beans ramekined – it makes them easier to bin. Fighting words.
How old is the full English, anyway? Depends whom you ask. The EBS claims it has its roots in the Norman Conquest and began to take its present shape in the 14th century.
And everybody else? Well, the food writer Felicity Cloake says the first printed mention appeared in 1933.
Do say: “Here’s your barbecued full English – would you like any rain on that?”
Don’t say: “Can you replace the baked beans with jelly beans?”