Craig Caroline - The Little Book of Brunch

Eggs, avocado, bacon, bagels this roll-call of delicious ingredients shows why brunch is by far the best meal of the day.

The Little Book of Brunch features a selection of the worlds best ever brunch recipes, ranging from Middle Eastern Shakshuka to traditional English Savouries, from simple Baked Eggs to indulgent Brioche French Toast. Whether youre in the mood to make something sweet or savoury, speedy or slow, these easy and adaptable recipes are everything a meal should be, whatever the time of day.

Caroline Craig has written for the Guardian and is the co-author of The Little Book of Lunch, The Cornershop Cookbook, and The Kew Gardens Childrens Cookbook. Her maternal family have been fruit farmers and wine producers in Provence for generations. A childhood spent gobbling home-grown tomatoes and peaches left her with little choice but to shape her life around delicious food and cooking for friends and family.

Sophie Missing is a writer and editor who started her career in publishing at Hodder & Stoughton and Penguin. She has written for the Guardian, the Observer, and MUNCHIES, and is the co-author of two previous cookbooks, The Little Book of Lunch and The Cornershop Cookbook. She lives in London.

The Little Book of Brunch is a collection of recipes for what many consider to be the best meal of the day.

But whats the deal with brunch why is the breakfast-lunch composite so increasingly popular?

Brunch isnt about shoehorning another meal into the day. As two people who write about food and love cooking, were pretty keen eaters, but even we draw the line at having breakfast, brunch, lunch and dinner (at least, not on a regular basis major holidays excepted). But brunch we do, and often too. For us, it almost always takes the place of both breakfast and lunch, and while of course its lovely to go out for the occasion sometimes, given the simplicity of many of the dishes on offer (avocado, coffee, eggs, toast) we often end up wondering what feasts we could have conjured up at home for the same price and without having to scramble to secure a table.

Brunch is about simple, unpretentious yet delicious fare. Its a meal that allows you to gorge on bread without being judged (whos to know youre not doing a 10K later?), to be able to cook food for those you love without spending or slaving too much, or simply to treat yourself to a good, nourishing, homemade meal, even if you missed breakfast.

Unlike, say, Sunday lunch, a weekend brunch holds all the promise of the day(s) ahead. It can provide the stomach-lining foundation for afternoons and nights out, or the carb-laced stupor for hours spent lolling on the sofa.

The timing of the meal itself is perfect. If its the morning after a Late One (we use the word morning loosely here), anyone you are cooking for will be grateful that they are not expected either to wake up or come over first thing. Brunch always perfectly coincides with raging hunger pangs: after all, hangovers wait for no lunch.

But what to cook for your perfectly orchestrated and satiating banquet?

Brunch can incorporate classic breakfast ingredients (eggs, sausages, toast), or be a riff on something you might think firmly lunch or dinner territory (an Indian breakfast curry, pizza or a fluffy jacket potato, say).

It can be as fancy or frugal as you like: you can splash out on sushi-grade salmon and invest the time in curing it yourself this costs about 6, so is not prohibitively expensive, but still a treat and it sounds lavish, doesnt it? Or you can spend 2 on tinned beans and jazz them up with spices to make a ful medames in 20 minutes.

It can be boozy or abstemious: you can crack out the cocktails and let brunch segue seamlessly into dinner, or you can have an enjoyable break from everything before continuing your day.

Its almost endlessly adaptable: there are as many different ingredients you can add to your scrambled eggs as there are schools of thought on how best to cook them. Dont have any coriander? Use something else or leave it out. Have a carrot you want to use up? Go ahead and grate it into your potato pancakes. Brunch is the meal when you can get away with anything.

Its also accessible; with the exception of a very few recipes involving curing, slow overnight cooking or proving, which do require some pre-planning, most of the recipes in this book can be made spontaneously our favourite way to cook.

Brunch can be a delightfully enjoyable way of catching up with those you love. Cooking brunch for friends and family is entertaining without the stress, expense or copious amounts of wine that a three-course dinner can involve. At brunch, people are generally happiest with coffee, juice, eggs and frequently replenished stacks of buttered toast. But equally, if you wish, you can spend a little extra on treat items. With a chunk of nduja sausage, some salmon or a posh sourdough loaf, often a little goes a long way. It all depends on the sort of affair youre planning.

Theres the hours-long Saturday morning brunch we have every couple of months with a group of friends, where we take turns to have people over. At these leisurely meals we might eat rhubarb compote, yoghurt and a little granola in small glasses to start, followed by boiled eggs, toast and a bit of cured ham if were feeling flush. This brunch might end in a gentle stroll through a local park though it might just as easily descend into drunken chaos and impromptu karaoke.

A weekday brunch is a wholly different affair, by necessity speedier and involving fewer components. It might be tinned chickpeas sauted with some green veg and topped with a fried egg, or some avocado squidged onto sourdough toast, seasoned with lemon juice, sea salt and chilli flakes (forgive us this clich; it does taste good). Whatever we eat, this type of brunch is a much-needed moment of peaceful enjoyment savoured between whatever else is going on during the day. This versatility is what can make brunch the most appealing of meals; its a moveable feast.

You can, of course, also cook the recipes in this book at any time of day, which brings us back to the fundamental joy of brunch: there really are no rules. Whether youre cooking for yourself, your housemates, family, partner or friends, when in doubt keep it simple or wing it.

The history of brunch

Many people think of brunch as a modern invention the more cynical might see it as an excuse for restaurants to charge a tenner for two tepid poached eggs. But the word was first used in an 1895 article in the (unsurprisingly now defunct) British magazine