My wife and I first experienced beans on toast as newlyweds in London in 1954 at a horrible London hotel, where we were lucky to get a room without a reservation, because every other accommodation was fully booked due to the auto show. The top floor walk-up was decorated with a random selection of mismatched wallpapers -- not one to a wall, but blue paisley followed by green stripes, etc. wherever the roll happened to run out -- and a bathtub so encrusted with rust (we hoped that was what that brown stuff was -- that we rushed out to a movie so that we could come back exhausted and fall into bed unwashed and without having to look at the walls.

Anyway, breakfast was of course included in the bleak basement and we were amazed to hear our neighbor, a distinguished Punjabi or Sikh with exotic beard and turban (all so strange to us cosmopolitan New Yorkers) order and consume beans on toast.

We thought it must be an Indian specialty that they provided for their Asian guests! We watched in wonder out of the corners of our eyes as he wiped the plate.

With all due respect for the nutritional value of beans as a source of protein, baked beans --Heinz or otherwise -- are so packed with sugars and salts, and the bread -- it was rarely other than pallid white then -- was so bland, that we couldn't, and can't, see how it can make a healthy meal.

It seemed then to be at least a cheap, filling satisfier in times of post-war shortages, but what is the excuse for it now? But in a country that relishes chip butties with all the vitamins and minerals that they supply, perhaps it is no wonder. Of course, if you want something green to go with it, there's always those mushy peas, as long as you're sure to wait until all the goodness has been cooked out of them.

Call me a chauvinistic culinary elitist.