Although its name sounds like a collision between breakfast and lunch, and although it does indeed take place somewhere between the times allotted to those two meals, brunch is a meal unto itself.
The elegant fusing of sweet and savoury ideas on the one plate is one of the glorious successes of the meal - that, and the fact that it offers a series of flavours which positively revel in the company of alcohol.
I am particularly fond of brunch because I find the taste buds are at their very best at the time of day it is served - somewhere around noon - so one's appreciation of the flavours is further enhanced, and of course we have that crystal-clean palate for the alcohol as well.
For many folk, of course, brunch is not a meal to cook at home. It is, rather, a meal you eat in a restaurant, where you find the right soundtrack, the Sunday papers, and someone to cook it for you and to wash up after. Well, weekend brunch is undoubtedly the coming meal, especially in Dublin, but there is no reason why you can't cook it and enjoy it at home every bit as much as in a restaurant. To prove this, I have sourced recipes from three of the great Dublin brunch haunts - The Elephant & Castle, Dish and The Mermaid Cafe, all in Temple Bar - and cooked them all at home. The results were brilliant - in fact, some of the most enjoyable domestic cooking I have done in some time.
I think one of the key elements in the recipes is the use of hollandaise sauce, the most subtle and suitable of all the great sauces, which matches brilliantly with eggs, beef, chicken, and pretty much everything. It is, of course, the classic ingredient in the most famous of all brunch recipes - Eggs Benedict.
As brunch is very much a mood meal, I should perhaps add that our weekend listening as we cooked and ate was the soundtrack from Stanley Tucci's movie, Big Night, which is wonderfully cheesy and enjoyable ItalianAmerican nonsense, and sets just the right tone.
We also discovered that, along with the drinks suggested by my colleague Mary Dowey, a scoop or two of Lustau's Papirusa Manzanilla, a sherry so dry it almost hurts, rings your bell long into the afternoon.