brekfis*
Madeleine Roux : Moveable feast
No South African experience is quite complete without a heartburn produced by your average guest-house breakfast. The table groans under the weight of leftovers from the British Empire, complete with dismal cut-glass bowls and tacky cruets.
Not only are we stuck with this terrible language as a legacy of those Brits, we still think scoffing bacon, sausages, eggs, tomatoes, even chips, all fried in grease, is the last word in guest-house luxury.
The revolting Full English Breakfast, often costing up to R30 a shot, should be deleted from B&B’s forever. Visitors from Europe blanch at the thought of a tour through a blistering hot Karoo, preceded by these platefuls of stodge, accompanied by white toast, cheap jam and bad-quality supermarket tea.
Here in Montagu we are often asked why guest houses offer so little variety by way of breakfast. People who plan a hiking day never want bacon, eggs, toast and coffee for breakfast. And they never win: variations on English breakfasts tend to make them worse, not better, with sweet muffins, heavily sugared yoghurt and cornflakes as unappetising extras.
Omelettes are often adulterated with whipped egg white and sour cream. Until we learn to cure bacon properly, like the Canadians or Germans, our fried bacon will always taste of fat.
Cheapskate establishments have the gall to give you hard margarine rolled into curls like butter and they often flatly deny having any butter on the premises at all.
Jam can be delicious, yes, but it should be slightly runny, the fruit whole in a clear syrup. Classic konfyt such as kumquat is delicious; tinned strawberry jam is nasty.
This dreadful food can be avoided by forgetting once and for all about the English culinary heritage. English food is best left to top-class English cooks. Haven’t we endured enough grey roast lamb drenched in Bisto gravy, accompanied by mushy frozen peas and bullet-shaped carrots.
Breakfast should suit our climate: think Morocco, not Manchester.
The Klein Karoo is the fruit bowl of the Cape. We ask in vain for fresh fruit such as a peach, a fig or an apricot in a guest house or restaurant. These fruits weigh down the boughs outside, but no, inside they serve tinned cherries and so-called cream squirted from a can.
In the mornings we dream of thick white yoghurt with strawberries or Beurre Bosch pears, of old-fashioned plaasbrood (farm bread) with unsalted butter, of something like hummus or tahina for breakfast instead of oily fried eggs.
We love spoonfuls of honey smeared on little pancakes, two slices of thin ham on a bagel, even poppy-seed rolls with mozzarella cheese and a dab of hot mustard.
Even a bordjie pap (plate of porridge) and brown sugar, tasting of childhood holidays by the sea, would not be amiss in a nice old-fashioned Bed and Breakfast.
What we won’t ever miss are pork sausages you can still taste two days later.
* Always the same damned English breakfast