The Houseman’s Breakfast

I almost missed Beet ‘n Squash YOU! this month. When Leela (She Simmers) and Mel (Gourmet Fury) announced that February would be battle mushroom, I knew exactly what I wanted to make. So I was not amused to find myself a hospital inpatient for rather too much of January. Let’s face it, any amount of time in hospital is too much. As I got better, I became increasingly frustrated. You see, it’s a tricky task to concoct a recipe whilst in hospital; and the dish I had planned would take a lot of concocting.



History is a great passion of mine (my secret love, if the truth be told) and I completed a history degree long before I finished medical school. If history is my secret love then old books are my open weakness, and I have spent many an hour drifting through recipe books from the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Remember The Lady Director’s Crimson Biscuits? The Lady Director didn’t limit herself to confectionary; this eighteenth century foodie dossier includes recipes for pickled mushrooms and white fricassee of rabbit. I say recipe in the loosest sense of the word; the book includes lists of ingredients without quantities or proportions – but I do enjoy a challenge.



Unfortunately, I made my escape from hospital with less than two weeks until the Beet ‘n Squash YOU! deadline, and the mushrooms would need that amount of time alone to pickle. And rabbit requires a trip to Borough Market. Whilst Borough Market is one of my favourite ways to spend a Saturday morning, it is also the number one Saturday morning destination for every foodie in London, if not Europe. And those guys are tough. Wrestling matches for the last brace of pheasants are not unknown, and there are certainly elbows involved when it comes to the vegetables. Add in a healthy portion of enthusiastic tourists for good measure, and Borough Market becomes something of a challenge for the “delicate”. Simply put, I didn’t quite feel up to it.



So, rather than bottle out, I decided to share an old favourite. This dish was the fuel for my houseman year.

In the UK, doctors in their first year of practice after finishing medical school were traditionally known as housemen. These days, they have been renamed FY1s. I was a houseman (yes, I am female. “Housewoman” just doesn’t fit!) and I do think that the new label just doesn’t cut it. Anyway, like all the other housemen I lived in the hospital. This used to be a compulsory arrangement. By the time I graduated, it was optional and encouraged. These days, the opposite seems to be true. I will save the lamentations for another post, but I think this is a shame and that the current FY1s miss out on a unique, if grueling experience.



By the time I was a houseman, much had been done to “civilize” junior doctors’ working hours. Despite this, I was still working every other weekend as a minimum. We measured days in twelve day blocks. Twelve days on, two days off. Twelve days on, two days off. My bosses could tell stories of far tougher regimes – we did either days or nights rather than both at once. And if you were organised, you could take annual leave. At the time I frequently wondered why I was subjecting myself to such a rigid way of life, but there was such camaraderie that I began to enjoy myself. Sometimes.



As the houseman, your job was to do everything that everyone else was too busy/important/senior/lazy/forgetful to do. At the end of each ward round, the Grown Ups would skip off to the canteen to eat breakfast (or we thought they did; as I become more grown up myself I am beginning to suspect that they skipped off to see patients in different parts of the hospital,) and we housemen would begin a day of ward jobs. Breakfast was a distant dream.



Alternate weekends on call negates all possibility for a social life. My best friend from medical school – my partner in extreme sandwich crime – worked at a hospital half an hour away. Obviously, we were not working the same alternate weekends. Every so often, one of us would swap (yes, that meant working two in a row) so we could spend the weekend together. I used to live for the feeling that started every Friday morning that wasn’t going to be followed by a Saturday and Sunday on the ward. It’s a wonderful feeling, and I still feel it on Fridays now when I won’t be working the weekend. But back then the feeling was stronger because being the houseman at the weekend is the worst job in medicine. On those Fridays when I would be meeting my buddy after work for a weekend off that feeling was even stronger.



Weekend activities were planned with military precision and executed with disregard for every carefully considered plan. The fact is, weekends off were first and foremost for sleep, and the shopping, restaurants, theatre, day trips we planned largely took place in our dreams. At least on weekends off, there was plenty of time to dream. By midmorning on Sunday we had usually slept enough to allow an expedition. A pilgrimage of sorts. The destination was always the same: an Italian restaurant that served a brunch that was an Italian take on the Full English Breakfast that the Grown Ups enjoyed in the canteen. It took the whole year, but by the time my stint as a houseman was over I could replicate that brunch perfectly. Creamy scrambled eggs with parmesan and chives, porcini mushrooms sauteed in butter, pancetta and toasted ciabatta. Heaven.



Part of me was ready to serve up a Full English Breakfast for Beet ‘n Squash YOU! – but it felt like cheating. Instead, I offer you The Houseman’s Breakfast; the origins of which are in that Italian-English breakfast I used to dream of as a houseman. This dish shares many of the same ingredients, but is a bit more grown up. Just a little. After all, I am no longer a houseman.



Ingredients (Roughly 3 portions; quantities as a guide only, this recipe is easily tweaked!)
3 eggs
3 tablespoons double cream
1 teaspoon finely grated parmesan
Ciabatta bread, sliced long-way
Pancetta, about 9 rashers
Oyster mushrooms, about 5 oz, torn into shreds
Butter for frying
Cinnamon powder
Salt and pepper
Balsamic vinegar to serve (optional)



Whisk together the eggs, cream and parmesan and season. Soak the bread in the egg mixture. Melt butter on a medium heat and then add the mushrooms. As the mushrooms cook, heat more butter in a separate frying pan and fry the bread (both sides) and pancetta. The bread becomes brown and crispy very quickly and burns easily, so remove swiftly from the pan to a plate as soon as it starts to brown!



Sprinkle the top of the bread with a pinch of cinnamon, and layer the pancetta and then the mushrooms on top. I like to dip mine in a drizzle of balsamic vinegar. As a houseman, I would never have dreamed of making a breakfast like this – but I really wish I had!