‘That’s a couple of hours of solid cycling,’ Gemma says sternly. ‘It doesn’t include stopping every 10 minutes to have a piece of fudge.’

Red Sauce Brown Sauce by Felicity Cloake 

A British Breakfast odyssey I read on the cover of Red Sauce Brown Sauce by Felicity Cloake … hhmm. Count me in. There’s no meal I love more than breakfast. Even better, Red Sauce Brown Sauce focuses on the fry up. 

Red Sauce Brown Sauce is a tour through the UK, via bicycle, car and train, with the author stopping at various towns and cities in the UK to sample the different foods you can have on your plate to make up a fry up. What I have learnt from this book is that opinions on what you serve in a fry up are entirely different, depending on where you are in the country. 

To start with, I raced through this book. I get so excited reading books, I read too fast and start skipping over the words. Fatigue did creep in because this is a big book. It also made me feel very hungry. Take this for an example ‘I unwrap the first – cheese and ketchup – crisp and slightly chewy at the top, deliciously soft and savoury in the middle, and oozing with warm Cheddar and sweet, vingary tomato. It doesn’t last a minute, and, reasoning they’ll be nicer hot, I turn my attention to the bacon.’ 

I don’t think this journey was linear and the timeline of events did feel odd at points. There were also the double issues of the Pandemic and Brexit. The former delaying parts of the journey, as well as visits to certain places not permitted, and the latter, having an effect on trade of smaller businesses that are supplying fish and black pudding. That was a very interesting part of the book. Red Sauce Brown Sauce was amusing. I was chortling through a lot of it. Reading the chapter on The Baked Bean Museum in Port Talbot I was thinking this cannot be real. Overall, Red Sauce Brown Sauce was a great educational read. It made me want to travel.

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