Book review – Breakfast: The Cookbook

This approach - one of exploring the world and its food in unison - has left the book with a fabulous honesty. There is plenty to delight and surprise, and Haarala Hamilton's photography presents every dish captured with Insta-worthy flair, but equally there are plenty of dishes that won't be appearing on your menu any time soon.

For example, hagelslag from the Netherlands - bread with butter and chocolate sprinkles - is unsurprisingly a fairly short recipe: smear, sprinkle, serve. However, if you ask Dutch people about the dish, you will discover it is eaten by children and adults, served in hospitals, and personalised with peanut butter, gouda or single-origin chocolate versions of the sprinkles. It's about culture, nourishment, nostalgia and national identity.

This spirit is what the book has been able to encapsulate so well. Across the centuries, breakfast may not have been the most important meal, but it is often the most intimate - one that, as Miller puts it, "displays our need for comfort through food". Her book explores "what goes on in the early hours around the world" as people sit sleepy eyed and dig into congee or masala koki or conchas. This vast 463-page collection is a bible for early hours' cuisine, presenting nothing more or less radical than the real food people crave and love when they wake up the world over.

Breakfast: The Cookbook by Emily Elyse Miller (Phaidon, £35)

•Try the recipe for cut rice noodle soup from the book here