England takes on France in battle of the breakfast

Two of our best known chefs are at loggerheads over the merits of the full English breakfast.

Frenchman Jean-Christophe Novelli, who has lived here for 20 years, has dismissed the traditional fry-up as a recipe for an early stroke, fit only for "abused bodies" after a night devoted to lager drinking.

But Marco Pierre White, 49, the son of an Italian mother, claims there is "no competition" between bacon and eggs with all the trimmings and its Continental equivalent.

He said: "No other country can claim to have a breakfast named after it because no other country serves up a worthy enough offering. No other breakfast is ever as memorable. The English breakfast creates a sense of occasion. Everyone has fond cooked breakfast memories."

He says he enjoys a full English so much he often asks one of his chefs to rustle him up one in the evening. But Novelli, 50, best known for his appearances in Hell's Kitchen, said: "The French don't eat toast. We don't need to, we make decent bread. Toasting bread is sacrilege - it's like cutting spaghetti."

He said Britons so often suffer a hangover that "when they wake up they need carbohydrates to feed their abused bodies...they fill their stomachs with fried meat and soft, limp white bread coated in butter and helped by a swig of milky coffee. The result is a bloated stomach aching for more lager."

Pierre White dismissed the attack in the June issue of Waitrose Kitchen magazine. "When you're offered a piece of fruit or a full English, it's obvious which one wins," he said.