This is not a full English due to the following issues or errors:

  • Fried eggs are ideal, poached acceptable, and some oddballs like scrambled. Boiled egg is not acceptable. There should be two eggs as standard, more if the breakfast is a ‘large’.
  • It’s missing baked beans that have simmered until the sauce thickens into a syrup.
  • While cafes love to serve this kind of tomato that’s only because it’s easy to keep a pot of chopped, tinned tomatoes warm. If you’re going tinned, they should be good quality whole plum tomatoes. But well-grilled fresh tomatoes are acceptable. No cherries. No vine attached. Definitely no raw tomato.
  • It’s missing the black pudding which elevates a fry-up into the full English.
  • Fans of the full English almost all prefer cooked sausages over raw ones.
  • The mushrooms look like they came in a tin. Ideally whole field or chestnut mushrooms shoud be used.

There is hearty debate amongst the governing body of the full English about whether or not hash browns are acceptable on a breakfast. Many declare them to be unwanted compared to, for example, bubble and squeak or a tattie scone, or even fried potatoes. They go further and label them ‘trash browns’, ‘American nonsense’, or just ‘shite’. Personally I don’t mind them, and consider them to be an optional addition, but not a core requirement of the full English. There are many other optional additions, not to mention regional specialities which render an Ulster fry very different to a full Welsh or a full Scottish. Hogs pudding, white pudding, fruit pudding, haggis, Lorne sausage, potato farl, soda bread, laverbread, kidneys, etc.

I am available for for keynote speeches on the subject should anyone be organising a full English conference.

The lack of beans and black pudding is especially egregious. If England is giving up on free speech they could at least go after these faux english breakfast frauds.