Sausages never need herbs. Time and again, I sit down to a hotel breakfast only to be met with sausages filled with all manner of shrubbery. Sage or parsley or some other Alan Titchmarsh-based arrangement.
Worse still is fruit. Apricots? In my sausages? They are uncordial and unnecessary. Beyond anything, though, are caramelised onions. Blasphemous, a damning indictment on the pork; a stupid, reckless and haphazard addition dreamed up by some recipe developer in a business park.
My views on sausages make Dublin a good location for breakfast, because in Ireland, generally, they do not mess about with the meat. Sausages are sausages, for the most part: simple cylinders of seasoned pork. These are always best when putting together a fry-up.
A fried breakfast is best when it is compartmentalised and the original flavours are allowed to sing in harmony. Think about it: bacon as is, salty, fatty and generous, curling around a piece of soft egg, the white tender, the yolk becoming a liquid lubricant, dancing across the butchered pig. It is the same with sausages. Let them be.
It was during a recent trip to Dublin that I shored up these views. I had a fine Irish breakfast on the terrace of a charming hotel called the Fitzwilliam, the weather was oddly beautiful, and the ingredients were as they should be: good eggs, black and white pudding, bacon, toast, a fried tomato and a wobbly field mushroom. No beans.
And then a sausage, in a strange sort of purgatory between expensive and Richmond. Quality pork, I’ve no doubt, but rusky and not at all coarse, as if grainy sausages, the kind so often seen in Britain, are a status symbol. The fact is, no sausage is better than one that doesn’t try.
This breakfast set me up perfectly for an unruly amount of basil. You see, I’m against herbs in sausages, but not in cocktails. I didn’t realise this until I went to a cocktail bar called Fidelity, on the northside of Dublin just across the river. I hope what follows shows that I am open to trying new things.
Usually, I feel the same about cocktails as I do about sausages: leave them be; tradition is best. Why mess about with a Negroni? Why add anything but cherry to a Manhattan? Experimentation and innovation are all very well, but they rarely come off, and my point is that is it a rare thing to see an old classic changed for the better.
Margaritas are a god-tier cocktail that need no intervention. But at Fidelity, they add a veritable garden of basil into the mix, and the result is a refreshing, earthy, well-balanced drink ideally suited to warm weather. We sat outside on the little tables and had numerous smashed basil margaritas, each one bright green, sweet with basil but tempered with chilli and lime. So many others were doing the same: people watching with this very modern herb-tickled tequila. Such a glorious way to while away a Sunday afternoon.
Fidelity is an excellent bar. One of the best I’ve been to anywhere for some time. There are craft beers, fun music, drinks of precision and a lively crowd eager to bookend another week with a good time.
There also happens to be a pan-Asian restaurant attached. Unfortunately, the menu is a little silly. I shuddered at the title of “Boss Bao’s”, but enjoyed the hunks of brash prawn toast, a mad creation of minced prawn inside deep-fried sourdough bread, and the fried chicken, endlessly moreish.
They came with a honey and mustard yoghurt which needed chilli. There were even xiao long bao, superbly made and full of flavour. And something of a full circle: minced pork again, seasoned but left well alone, supported only by a rich stock and the Homer Simpson-belly motion of delicate pastry. A fitting interlude to more basil margaritas (and more sausages, eventually).
