First things

RIGHTLY or wrongly, we British may not be renowned for the quality of our cooking. But while our continental neighbours may grimace at the stereotype of soggy vegetables, tinned stew and too much fish and chips, no one could deny there is one meal we do excel at: the traditional cooked breakfast.

Go into the centre of any major town or city such as York and while you will have no problem finding an Italian, Chinese, Greek or Indian restaurant, you might have more trouble finding one that owns up to being English. Modern European is probably the closest you'll get.

Go in search of a good breakfast, though, and it's a different story. The 'Full English' is to be found at hotels, guest houses and restaurants everywhere.

Up and down the country there are some great regional variations, too, featuring everything from Suffolk sweet-cured bacon or Cumberland sausages to Welsh pancakes or Bath buns.

But what about Yorkshire? Is there such a thing as a traditional 'Yorkshire' breakfast? With national Farmhouse Breakfast Week beginning tomorrow, now seemed like a good time to find out.

Other than in the obvious sense of a Yorkshire breakfast being one made with good Yorkshire produce, probably not, admits Nigel Brotherton of Moorsfresh, a Pickering company which specialises in supplying local produce to shops, hotels and restaurants across the county. At least, he says, he has never come across one.

Better to be honest than bogus. He relates the story of a Newcastle hotel which boasted a 'Full English breakfast with local speciality.'

"My colleague asked 'what is this local speciality?'" he recalls. "The waitress said 'it's the mushrooms.' He said 'I can get mushrooms in London' and she said 'I know, I told the management it is not very special up here, but they insisted in putting it on the menu!'"

If those mushrooms were locally grown or picked, though, the Newcastle hotel manager might not have been that daft after all. According to Victor Buchanan, of the White Swan in Pickering, a true Yorkshire breakfast is nothing more than a breakfast made with good Yorkshire ingredients.

The hotel does a wicked breakfast for residents and non-residents alike using ingredients mainly sourced from within 20 miles of Pickering.

It includes bacon, black pudding and free range eggs from Thornton Dale, sausages made from Yorkshire pork by a local butcher in Pickering, and locally produced mushrooms (wild ones in season). It's rounded off with good Yorkshire tea (naturally) from Taylors of Harrogate and the hotel's own home-made bread.

Or if you want something a little different, you could try smoked Whitby haddock with local free range eggs or eggs benedict.

The benefit of using local produce, both Victor and Nigel agree, is not only that it's good for the environment (fewer food miles travelled) but also that it tastes better.

"The food is entirely natural and has not been treated with anything to make it last longer, or frozen, which reduces it's taste by one third at least," says Victor.

Grant Burton, East Yorkshire pig farmer and Evening Press columnist, who will be giving a talk on Farmhouse Breakfasts at the Great Yorkshire showground in Harrogate on Monday, adds that there is a further benefit. You know where the food comes from and how it was produced.

"You know where it has been, what it has been fed on, and that it has been treated in a humanitarian manner and looked after properly," he says.

Andy Clark, partner in Lady Anne Middleton's Hotel in York, agrees that local produce is a key ingredient in any 'Yorkshire breakfast'. Any breakfast can only be as good as what goes into it, he points out. Thankfully, the quality of food available in Yorkshire is as good as anywhere in the world, he says - making a 'Yorkshire' breakfast a real world-beater.

The hotel's restaurant sources much of its food locally and, challenged to come up with a Yorkshire breakfast, Andy's chef Steve Varley produced a real corker.

Grilled Barnsley chop ("I think you'd be hard pushed to find a Barnsley chop anywhere outside Yorkshire," points out Andy proudly); sauted lambs' liver; kidney and black pudding; grilled lean-cut Yorkshire bacon from near Allerton; Yorkshire Gold sausages from Boroughbridge; locally-grown field mushrooms from York and local free-range eggs. The breakfast also includes fried bread, sauted new potatoes and grilled tomato: plus, of course, Yorkshire tea to wash it down.

There is one other requirement for a good Yorkshire breakfast, however, adds Steve Varley jokingly: it needs to be cooked by a Yorkshireman.

He should know. The 29-year-old chef is York born and bred.

Updated: 10:02 Saturday, January 18, 2003