For a long time I have wanted to try a full English breakfast. I was at PJ McIntyre’s Irish Pub on the west side of Cleveland and they offer a full Irish breakfast among other Irish foods. The owner and several employees are Irish and he said he buys things like the black and white puddings right from Ireland as there is no local equivalent.
It was indeed the sumptuous feast I had envisioned. The Irish version may be better since it includes black and white puddings (oatmeal sausages). Much of the breakfast was familiar: the eggs, bacon, toast and hash browns. Of course the bacon is English style.
I was disappointing at the banger. I had pictured a snappy, firm sausage where it was quite soft and bland. I mean, it’s a banger, am right? Perhaps there are various types of breakfast bangers? The remainder was puzzling. I see some people put the Heinz beans on the toast. That actually sounds good, I’ll have to try it. But they were good by themselves.
That leaves the tomato and mushrooms. They were perfectly good but thy don’t seem to realty go with anything. I’m ready for another go.
But I wish we had a good Irish Pub nearby. The one we had is barely Irish anymore. Hell, they added a pizza oven. The next closest Irish Pub was just crappy.
We took a two-week vacation in Ireland, about 30 years ago, and we stayed exclusively in bed-and-breakfasts. With one exception, every place served us the full Irish breakfast, and after a week or so, it got a little repetitive (not to mention terribly filling and greasy).
It’s not unlike having a full breakfast at Cracker Barrel or Waffle House every morning – it sounds appealing, but after a couple of days, that appeal wears off.
Some ‘Irish Recipe’ sausages are very smooth ground and soft. Ireland does know how to make really good sausages though.
Sausages from the British Isles in general can range from bland paste-in-a-tube to superbly meaty, snappy, succulent and piquantly-spiced; the smoother ones with unidentifiable contents are ‘bangers’; bangers are cheap.
Did it include the brown soda bread? That’s the food I remember most from my trip to Ireland staying in B&Bs. I think I could have lived off of brown bread alone for that two weeks without getting tired of it.
The term ‘banger’ supposedly comes from WWII when (on account of rationing) the ingredients in sausages were made mostly from water, rusk and vegetable fillers, with a little bit of ground up meat and fat, and they would explode (well, burst) when cooked.
Nowadays, often if you see sausage-like things labelled ‘bangers’, it means they are below the level of meat content to legally be called ‘sausages’ (and that standard doesn’t exactly set a high bar - 32% meat for just ‘sausage’, 42% pork if you want to call it a ‘pork sausage’)
I will on occasion make a Full English, but without any of the “pudding” or other offal the English are so happy to eat. Usually I pare it down to the basic EBCB, with a Bloody Mary and Daddies sauce.
Last year I went to an Irish pub on the Strip in Vegas that had a pretty solid Irish breakfast;
Regular toast instead of the soda bread, but it had both black and white puddings, and it was consistently tasty (could’ve used a larger portion of tomato and mushrooms, though).
There are lodgings in the UK that have haggis on their breakfast menus, bur SFAIK they’re all north of the English border.
I like haggis—it tastes like spicy liverwurst. But I wouldn’t want it every day. I can buy canned haggis at my local Scottish import shop over in North York (Ontario).
Bangers are definitely an acquired taste, but I quite like them. It helps if they’re served with HP sauce or Colman’s yellow mustard.
Of course you can get delicious regional sausages, but I would save them for making dishes like Lancashire hotpot. A full breakfast without bangers just wouldn’t be the same.
