Lyonnaise Salad

Start with the bacon, because everything else in this dish borrows from it. You fry it dry — no oil — because bacon carries its own fat, and adding more just dilutes what you're trying to extract. The streaky, smoked kind is traditional in a British kitchen and it's not sentiment: smoked bacon renders a fat with more flavour in it than unsmoked, so the bread and the dressing both taste of something, not just salt and crisp. If you only have back bacon, fine, it'll crisp differently — thinner, less fat rendered — so fry the bread in a little butter alongside it rather than relying on fat that isn't there.

The bread wants to be rustic — open crumb, a bit of chew — because a soft sandwich loaf collapses into crumbs in hot fat instead of holding a crust. Rubbing it with raw garlic first, not cooking the garlic in, is an old trick: raw garlic rubbed onto a porous surface leaves its oil and smell behind without burning, and burnt garlic is bitter in a way that no amount of seasoning fixes. The butter on top is there for browning — fat conducts heat into the bread's surface faster than the bread's own moisture can, which is the entire difference between "toasted" and "fried crisp."

The eggs are the mechanism of the whole dish, so take the vinegar and the whirlpool seriously. Vinegar lowers the pH of the poaching water, which makes the egg white firm up faster — that's what stops it trailing off into wisps the moment it hits the water. Apple cider vinegar is specified for its mildness; any vinegar does the chemistry, but a sharp white vinegar will leave a taste you can detect in the finished egg, so use what smells the gentlest. The whirlpool isn't a flourish — spinning water wraps the white around the yolk as it sets, instead of letting it spread flat across the pan. Some say you need a splash of boiling, roiling water for a poached egg — no, because a violent boil tears the white apart before it's had a chance to set; just off the boil is exactly where you want it, water trembling, not thrashing.

Crack each egg into its own small bowl before it goes anywhere near the water. This isn't fussiness — it's insurance against a weak or old egg, which spreads into watery threads the second it touches heat, ruining the pan for the eggs that follow it. A bowl lets you see the egg and decide, calmly, whether it's good enough to go in.

For the dressing, mayonnaise and mustard do the same job from different directions: mayonnaise carries fat and body, mustard carries sharpness and helps bind the oil-and-vinegar components so they don't separate on the plate. Honey is there to round off the mustard's heat, not to sweeten the salad — use it sparingly, a thin stream, not a spoonful dolloped in. If you don't have Dijon, any mustard with real bite works; yellow American mustard is too mild and too sweet already, so you'd need to drop the honey.

Rocket and watercress earn their place by contrast — both carry a peppery bitterness that a mild salad mix alone can't give you, and that bitterness is what keeps the rich bacon fat and egg yolk from feeling heavy on the tongue. If you can't get watercress, baby spinach with an extra pinch of mustard in the dressing gets you partway there, though it's a stand-in, not a swap with the same character. Chives go on last and raw, because any heat at all turns their sharp onion snap into something flat and grassy — they're there for a clean, fresh bite against all that fat.