Sausage and Egg Muffin

Saturday morning. The kitchen is cold, the kettle is on, and a sausage is spitting in a hot pan. There are few sounds more promising than that: the pop and hiss of pork fat hitting cast iron, the smell that drifts through the house before you've properly woken up. This is not complicated food. It is necessary food.

A sausage and egg muffin is the kind of thing that doesn't get written about because nobody thinks it needs to be. But it does. A good one, made at home with a proper sausage and a fresh egg and a muffin toasted in the residual fat, is a different creature entirely from whatever arrives through a drive-through window in a cardboard sleeve. This is breakfast that means someone got up and did something for you. Or for themselves. Both count.

The sausage matters most. Find one from a butcher who can tell you what's in it. Good pork, a decent amount of fat, maybe some herbs. Squeeze it from its skin and press it into a flat patty that fits the muffin. The egg goes in next, fried in the sausage fat, edges lacy and crisp, yolk still soft enough to run when you bite through. Brown sauce or ketchup is between you and your conscience. I keep both in the cupboard and reach for whichever my hand finds first.