Egg and bacon flan

When my son was a baby his doctor was called Dr Poorly… actually that wasn’t her name, her name was spelled differently but pronounced like ‘poorly’ – which is a synophone, a word spelled  and meaning something different from another but sounding the same and English has lots of them hear/here, hair/hair and so on…

So back to Dr Poorly – we thought it so comical that she sounded as if she was ‘poorly’ but was a doctor… my husband did start a ‘physician heal thyself..’ joke when I introduced him, but a swift nudge from me and it died away to a mumble which I hoped I covered with a lot of babble… No doubt she was used to it, she was a lovely person and a great and very reassuring doctor to us first time parents.

My son developed a slight allergy to eggs when he first started different foods, he got a rash round his mouth; being an anxious mother I went to consult Dr Poorly. She told me what I already knew, that he should avoid eggs and egg products… and as he only ate what we cooked that would be easy…

“Poor lad,” she said sympathetically. “It means he won’t be able to eat quiche!”

I must admit I chuckled to myself as I pushed the pram home from the surgery… not only had quiche been the last of my thoughts compared of a future young man without bacon and egg for breakfast, cakes or puddings… But I also chuckled at what a hilariously middle-class thing it was to say, and remembering the best-selling book ‘Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche’ by Bruce Fierstein…

My husband thought it funny too, in the nicest possible way because Dr Poorly was such a kind and caring doctor and her concern was genuine, and we discussed how so many great British foods had been ‘Frenchified’. No restaurant had chips, they served pommes frites, meat paste was now paté, pancakes were crêpes and this was twenty years ago!

The more I have thought about it since then, the more I feel a sense of indignation – as if it’s all part of the conspiracy that British food has always been awful until rescued in the 1950’s by Elizabeth David and her contemporaries, and the British didn’t know how to cook. This makes me so cross! My grandmother used garlic, and she was a girl who scrubbed floors having left school at 13! My father’s family had different sorts of gravy, made in different ways and served with different meals, including a special thin gravy for sausages served for breakfast! Everyone has wonderful recipes handed down from grandmothers and great-grandmothers and their grandmothers before them! Allotments were created in towns and cities so ordinary folk could have good, fresh, home-grown fruit and vegetables because they cared about what they ate, however poor they were!

Rant over… and back to quiche. As a child we often had often egg and bacon flan, yes flan, not quiche, for dinner; a crisp, light, short-crust pastry case filled with crispy bacon and eggs beaten with a little milk and plenty of pepper . Occasionally cheese was added to this cheap and simple dish, or maybe finely sliced leeks fried in butter, or peas, or mushrooms – with a quarter of the pie mushroom-free as my sister didn’t like them… sometimes there were thin slices of tomato to decorate the top…

Maybe we’ll have egg and bacon flan for dinner…