Meals and cooking

When we cook, we boil, roast, fry or stew our food. We boil eggs, meat, chicken, fish, milk, water and vegetables. We fry eggs, fish and vegetables. We stew fish, meat, vegetables or fruit. We roast meat or chicken. We put salt, sugar, pepper, vinegar and mustard into our food to make it salted, sweet, sour or simply tasty. Our food may taste good or bad or it may be tasteless. The usual meals in England are breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner or, in simpler houses, breakfast, dinner, tea and supper. For breakfast English people mostly have porridge or corn-flakes with milk or cream and sugar, bacon and eggs, marmalade with buttered toast and tea or coffee. For a change they can have a boiled egg, cold ham, or fish. English people generally have lunch about one o'clock. At lunch time in a London restaurant one usually finds a mutton chop, or steak and chips, or cold meat or fish with potatoes and salad, then a pudding or fruit to follow. Afternoon tea can hardly be called a meal. It is a substantial meal only in well-to-do families. It is between five and six o'clock. It is rather a sociable sort of thing, as friends often come in then for a chat while they have their cup of tea, cake or biscuit. In some houses dinner is the biggest meal of the day. But in great many English homes, the midday meal is the chief one of the day, and in the evening there is usually a much simpler supper — an omelette, or sausages, sometimes bacon and eggs and sometimes just bread and cheese, a cup of coffee or cocoa and fruit.