"The King's Breakfast"

We were reminded of A. A. Milne's poem "The King's Breakfast" in When "We Were Very Young" when the King hoping for breakfast and discovers to his horror that there is no butter for "The Royal slice of bread"

It has always been something of a Sunday morning ritual, Kippers [smoked Scottish herrings], with brown bread, orange juice and strong tea; if the dogs are lucky they'd get a sandwich of bread soaked in the Kipper juice.
Like the King wanting "A little bit of butter for My bread!" we had hoped for the juicy smoked herring fillets on our bread, but this was not to be,

The Kippers in question had been purchased the day before from our fish store in the Byward Market, but when I opened the bag found some strange long dark herrings and the label read Smoked Dutch Style, in truth they had
never been near the Netherlands.

A pan was found to accommodate them and when they were poached - they had curled up and looked even worse. John was to be the first to sample and pronounced them 'very salty' but did not sob, or whimper. Sunday morning's breakfast treat was not to be.

We tried our local Market grocer, then the up-scale grocery on Beechwood without success. About to give up, we told our Bulgarian family member, Mimi of the problem and she smiled and said ' The Super Store has them!’
Our next trip into town found us entering the Super Store and without much delay, discovered the fish counter and the packets of Scottish Kippers, delighted I bought five of the frozen Kippers. These are lovely little boneless, boil in the bag with a butter ‘flower’ imprint; when I was very young they came as FISH with bones and all, and it would take a good five minutes to remove the spine and all the bones buried in the flesh.

The following Sunday morning saw us seated at the table, with the sun’s reflection off the lake playing on the ceiling and a lovely breakfast of Kippers, brown bread , orange juice and tea; with three dogs waiting for their tribute of bread soaked in Kipper broth.