Book review: Red Sauce Brown Sauce by Felicity Cloake

The writer has us at the Pooh quote on breakfast right at the start of the book, and it`s a fun ride from there on.

In 2019, Felicity Cloake released her One More Croissant for the Road, a delightful culinary travelogue of her tour de France, as it were, cycling across that country on her sturdy cycle Eddy, in search of the perfect croissant.

Four years later, she`s out with Red Sauce Brown Sauce, another culinary record of her (yes, cycling) trips across the United Kingdom. This time, she`s tracking the typical British breakfast, and looking to find which of the two sauces, ketchup or brown sauce, rates as top favourite across England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland.

Taking us along as she cycles past some very pretty stretches, then some arid industrial lands, stopping for a bit of brekkie every chance she gets, falling off her bike a couple of times, tearing a hamstring one time, meeting some interesting characters, Cloake , on the whole has a merry time of it, and so do we.

And yes, there`s a fair sprinkling of recipes for typical English breakfast items like kippers kedgeree, hog`s pudding, buttermilk pikelets, omelette Arnold Bennet, and more, through the book.

Cloake did her trip when coronavirus ruled the world, so there were quite a few times when she couldn’t visit purveyors of various foods at the Marmite, Heinz and Weetabix factories, or meet the experts who could have cast light on these foods.

Britain is a country that runs on breakfast, declares Cloake, directing our attention to Insta accounts dedicated to fry-ups, spilling the tea on bubble and squeak, tattie scones, laverbread, faggots, good ole baked beans, how marmalade was once served as part of a dessert course, how micro leaves have absolutely no place on a plate of Full Scottish, how Rishi Sunak didn’t do Yorkshire tea any good by tweeting a pic of himself brewing that tea for his team, and a paragraph on my favourite breakfast cereal, Weetabix. In between, we watch her cross places with names like Catbrain, Usk, Ceredigion and Ballyomeny.

As to which sauce is preferred across the UK, apparently men, northerners, Scots and the elderly prefer brown sauce, with the young, the southerners, those from Wales and the Midlands opting for the red stuff. The author herself is unambiguous on the subject: ketchup is all well and good, she says—as long as you don’t mind not being able to taste anything else on the plate.

And now, I`ll hie me to the kitchen now, to try making some stotties.