Carol’s Column

The ultimate civilised breakfast, SA style

THERE'S no doubt, my family has been deprived. For all these years they have missed out.

I came to that conclusion after reading an article on breakfasting in the UK.

It seems the Millstone Hotel in Lancashire, England, is offering the "ultimate meal for connoisseurs of breakfast" and this three-hour feast for two costs only R1 000.

So what do you get for R1 000?

A 10-course meal served by waiters in dinner jackets and savoured to the accompaniment of a jazz-playing quartet. As you sit down to breakfast, you are handed the available daily newspapers, ironed.

The food is served on an exquisite Wedgewood china service (your souvenir to take home and giggle over), and iced French champagne is available throughout the meal.

The menu is decidedly different. Highlights include a choice of seven kinds of egg — hen, goose, turkey, quail, golden plover, pigeon and duck, customised game-flavoured sausages made to the length, shape and width you request, an exotic kedgeree made with fresh lobster, and a mega muesli of 20 different grains and dried fruits.

Your choice of jam will be especially created for you by the chef, and with your scones, toast and crumpets, you get a choice of five types of coffee and five flavours of tea.

Manager Mr Richard Robinson is on record as saying: "Too many people have forgotten that breakfast is to be enjoyed as the meal of the day and should be a cultured civilised pleasure."

Quite right. Which is why I decided to take the Lazar breakfast in hand and turn it into a cultured civilised pleasure.

I thought I'd wait for the weekend so that everyone could enjoy what they were about to receive.

The table was laid with the Siberian crystal glasses inherited from my great great grandmother Anuschka, the bone-handled imperial cutlery originally belonging to the Tzarina and the white Chantilly lace tablecloth embroidered by my great, great, great Uncle Boruch's wife Gittel who hailed from Chantilly. Or was it Dwinsk? One forgets after all these years.

For a centrepiece I plucked the hothouse orchid my husband had lovingly nurtured in the bathroom for the past 18 years and placed it in an ancient Ming vase picked up at the Flea Market.

It took me half an hour to assemble my spouse and offspring around the table. As I looked at my cultured, civilised family, I felt proud. There was my husband, bleary eyed and unshaven, immaculately clad in his knee-sagging rugby shorts. My third youngest unmarried son sat fast asleep, emitting a gentle snore now and again, while my only daughter was lost behind her hair. Conversation was non-existent.

Instead of a live jazz quartette, they got Bruce Springsteen which immediately shocked them all awake and then I handed them the Saturday newspapers. The Afrikaans press looked particularly good all ironed and flattened.

"Why are you wearing makeup and earrings with your nightie?" said my husband as his swivelling eyeballs focused on me.

"This is not my nightie," I said haughtily. A little haught is good for constipation, they say. "This is my Christian Dior ballgown I bought at the Toc-H shop for R27,95."

I sailed into the kitchen and sallied forth with the first course of this civilised breakfast. A mega muesli made of 47 grains, 38 dried fruits and 22 nuts presented with honey, cream and yoghurt.

"Yuk," said Jamie.

Undaunted I suggested eggs. "You can have ostrich, vulture, hen, rock pigeon, Egyptian goose, or Zoo Lake duck," I said. "In the form of an omelette, poached, fried, sunny side up, sunny side down, scrambled or grilled."

They were overwhelmed.

Then came the piece de resistance. The customised boerewors. A choice of their own size wors from eland, springbok, impala or elephant.

Nicky asked for a square elephant sausage, while Jamie chose dainty springbok cocktail worsies. My husband opted for a metre-long eland wors.

It's actually amazing what you can do with a supermarket beef boerewors if you change its shape and give it another name.

Instead of lobster kedgeree, I served toasted limpets. And instead of iced French champagne, we enjoyed Tassenberg and orange juice.

Then came biltong scones, the black and white mingling traditionally, and they had the choice of kumquat, guava, waterblommetjie, naartjie, Cape gooseberry or melon jam.

I tried not to show my hurt when Jamie fetched the peanut butter from the kitchen. And when Nicky fed her poached vulture egg to Mahoney waiting in her customary open-jawed position under the table, I was insulted. But when my husband poured tomato sauce over his customised eland boerewors, I was scandalised.

"Do you realise what you are doing?" I shrieked in a cultured and civilised way. "I will never, ever again get up early to cook this family an ultimate meal for connoisseurs of breakfast."

"Is that a promise?" said my spouse.

Some things are unmentionable in polite society. What followed was not mentionable.

It is easy to be civilised and cultured. But sometimes it is highly pleasurable to be uncouth.

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