Culture on the Breakfast Menu

W henever I travel in Europe and receive a breakfast invitation, my acceptance is a must. Not because I am particularly keen about breakfast. On the contrary, I am someone who can easily get along with simply a breakfast tea.

But the breakfast culture in Europe is worth studying.

Let us quickly turn away from the southern European bar breakfasts. Clearly, the small and strong coffee, which everybody outside the region refers to as Espresso and the buttery soft French croissant, or its less soft Italian imitation, cannot impress so much.

The classic English breakfast is probably most familiar to us, with its ham and eggs (for Muslims now also with halal turkey ham), red beans or porridge.

Please don’t get me wrong. By familiar, I mean to say that we know about the components. Of course it takes a while until this rather extravagant early morning dish can become familiar to a non-English stomach.

My personal favourite is the German breakfast. Simply because it allows eating for as long as you want, while you will always discover yet another component.

While in the UK, the standard English breakfast often appears energetically delivered by a well-tempered waitress, for a German breakfast you usually sit down at a readily set-up table.

At such occasions I sometimes fail to fully appreciate the highly sophisticated geometric arrangements of all the breakfast accessories, starting from the little spoons in four different sizes and the egg-top cutter, to the breakfast table dustbin, mostly in the very centre of the table.

Once the food is added to the arrangement, the import-export world champion certainly honours its title.

It is a multi-faceted composition ranging from the very local, like the homemade multi-grain rolls or pretzel, to very different delicacies, including Norwegian smoked salmon and Pacific fruits.

Fruits seem to please a new post-modern exoticism, in particular in hotel breakfast rooms.

The more fruits and cheeses we find on offer that an ordinary visitor cannot name correctly, the better the perceived quality of the place.

All is of course in addition to the standard English ham and eggs, the North American bagels, muffins and waffles (including maple syrup) and the collection of croissants and other sweet and small pieces, which are also available.

There are yet the muesli bowls to be discovered. Not only cornflakes, chocolate and forest fruit muesli, but also bran fibres, cinnamon balls, honey snacks and whatever other mysterious names they carry.

And while carefully studying my latest German breakfast hosts, I was impressed how important each little component seemed to be, given that every empty jar had to be immediately refilled.

There is only one aspect left to be desired: something proper to drink with this breakfast celebration.

Unfortunately, German coffee stays far behind its Mediterranean competitors and the teas cannot compete with the offers in England.

Fresh fruit juices, which may still be an alternative, have never been a German strength.

While hoping that Germany discovers a new breakfast drink that could crown it the breakfast queen – hot chocolate is so far my personal favourite – I recommend to everybody travelling to Germany to skip dinner, in favour of arriving hungry for breakfast the following morning.

Al Zekri is an independent Bahraini cultural anthropologist