Our June issue is out now, and it’s all about breakfast. Pat Nourse kicks things off with his editor’s letter.
” ‘Porridge or prunes, sir? Porridge or prunes?’
Breakfast had begun. That cry still rings in my memory.
“It is an epitome – not, indeed, of English food, but of the forces that drag it into the dirt. It voices the true spirit of gastronomic joylessness. Porridge fills the Englishman up, prunes clear him out, so their functions are opposed. But their spirit is the same: they eschew pleasure and consider delicacy immoral…
“Everything was grey. The porridge was in grey lumps, the prunes swam in grey sauce… Then I had a haddock. It was covered in a sort of hard, yellow oilskin, as if it had been in a lifeboat, and its inside gushed salt water when pricked. Sausages and bacon followed this disgusting fish. They, too, had been up all night. Toast like steel: marmalade a scented jelly. I paid the bill dumbly, wondering again why some things have to be. They have to be because this is England, and we are English.”
To read EM Forster on England and breakfast is to be all the more thankful you live in a time and place when delicacy and pleasure at the table are considered good things. And where better to breakfast than Australia in 2017, a wonderland where great baking, good butter and the most vigorous coffee culture in the world collide happily with a society that finds joy in flavours from all over the globe?
If you want to really invigorate your morning, meanwhile, there’s much to be said for waking up on the premises of one of the winners featured in our Hotel Awards. Thanks to the support of Nespresso and the hard work of editor Helen Anderson and project manager Kendall Hill, the 2017 Australian Hotel Guide brings you the nation’s best beds and most luxurious getaways. There’s never been a better time to have a go at being a morning person. Start your day right.