Breakfast is the least analyzed meal. With quarantine, it’s taken on new meaning. We’re no longer grabbing a coffee and a corn muffin from the minimart, hustling to work as if Vince Lombardi were chewing us out. Some of us are taking more care with it.
There’s a small literature of the meal. I’ve owned breakfast cookbooks I’ve never opened. (Breakfast cookbooks are always slightly ridiculous.) But there is also, if you’re alert to it, a lot to be gleaned from novels, biographies and memoirs about starting your culinary day.
Let’s begin with cereal. I no longer keep cereal in the house because it has great power over me. I’ll finish a box in a week, in furtive bowls consumed at midnight. I’ll be in my pajamas, flipping through back issues of the New Statesman looking for Tracey Thorn’s columns. From behind, I resemble a bear that has knocked over a trash can.
When I do have a bowl of cereal, I remember that Peter De Vries proposed, in his novel “The Glory of the Hummingbird,” that a thinking person’s cereal might be branded “Joyce Carol Oates.”
I recall the moment in Donald Barthelme’s witchy novel “Snow White” when the characters “regarded each other sitting around the breakfast table with its big cardboard boxes of ‘Fear,’ ‘Chix’ and ‘Rats.’” Then there’s Gary Shteyngart’s memoir, “Little Failure,” in which he wrote: “Cereal is food, sort of. It tastes grainy, easy and light, with a hint of false fruitiness. It tastes the way America feels.”
There are many dishes I don’t want to see in the morning. Claire Tomalin, a biographer of Thomas Hardy, reported that his favorite breakfast was “kettle broth — chopped parsley, onions and bread cooked in hot water.”
In a diary entry from 1983, Richard Burton wrote about Elizabeth Taylor: “She stinks of garlic — who has garlic for breakfast?” Vladimir Nabokov was asked about moments from the past that he wished had been captured on film, and replied: “Herman Melville at breakfast feeding a sardine to his cat.”
I’m from West Virginia, and we are a biscuit-loving people. A Huntington-based chain, Tudor’s Biscuit World, has a cultlike following. I eat biscuits with only moderate enthusiasm. They’re so filling that they prevent me from ingesting the other things I’d like to be eating. Like an unsolicited manuscript, a big biscuit can really punch a hole in your morning.
I’d like to be more like Ralph Ellison, who wrote to a friend that he dismayed people “with the vast damage I could do to a pan of biscuits.” Harry Crews, in his memoir “A Childhood,” wrote that he liked to puncture a biscuit and fill it with syrup, and then keep refilling it until it wouldn’t absorb anymore. He’d put two pieces of fried pork on top and share the whole thing with his dog.
In my house, we sometimes splurge on fancy butter, but mostly we use Land O’Lakes. The brand recently removed the Native American woman from its logo. I’m down with this, even if I’m gloomy that generations of bored children will never be able to discover the trick Lorrie Moore described in her novel “Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?”
Moore’s young and desperately horny characters would devote themselves to “cutting out the Indian maiden from the package and bending the knees so that they appeared like breasts through a slot we made in her chest.” The things we did for fun before the internet.
An easy and inexpensive way to feel beneficent is to cook a package of bacon (I use the oven method) before anyone else is awake. I respect Susan Sontag’s interest in bacon. Sigrid Nunez, in her memoir “Sempre Susan,” wrote that Sontag would sometimes cook a whole package of bacon and call it dinner.
I like ham just as much with breakfast. In “The Taste of Country Cooking,” Edna Lewis wrote: “Ham held the same rating as the basic black dress. If you had a ham in the meat house any situation could be faced.” This is lockdown wisdom.
Last fall on Broadway, I saw a production of Sam Shepard’s “True West” starring Ethan Hawke and Paul Dano. I like productions of “True West” because a lot of toast is flung around onstage, the way it used to be at midnight screenings of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”
If you don’t know “True West,” a character goes on a rampage one night and steals all the toasters from local houses. “There’s gonna be a general lack of toast in the neighborhood this morning,” he comments.
Long ago I used to fear, when drinking, that I would do something like steal all the toasters in the neighborhood. Now I fear becoming the character in Shepard’s “Fool for Love” who believes he is married to Barbara Mandrell.
Nicholson Baker’s miraculous “The Mezzanine” is among the great toast novels in our literature. His narrator instructs readers to cut toast diagonally instead of straight across because “the corner of a triangularly cut slice gave you an ideal first bite.”
Conversely, if you made the mistake of cutting your toast rectangularly, “you had to angle the shape into your mouth, as you angle a big dresser through a hall doorway.”
The English novelist Henry Green, in a Paris Review interview, described one of life’s great pleasures (he was paraphrasing someone else) as “lying in bed on a summer morning, with the window open, listening to the church bells, eating buttered toast” with the smell of the previous night’s lovemaking still on one’s fingers.
Let’s conclude with eggs. I cook two almost every morning. Often the results belong in the Hall of Fame. On gray days when I blow it and overcook them, they still belong in the Hall of Very Good. I like to put on “C’est Bon, Les Oeufs,” that most unusual of Leadbelly’s songs.
When we can, we buy eggs straight from the farm. While doing so, I sometimes think of Gabriel García Márquez’s experience reporting in Cuba. Noting that Cuban housewives looked down on mass-produced eggs with “languid yolks and pharmacy taste” and the brand symbol of a North Carolina farm stamped on their shells, “savvy grocers wash them with solvent and daub them with chicken poop to sell them at a higher price.”
In “Killers of the Flower Moon,” David Grann wrote that J. Edgar Hoover was fanatical about his poached eggs. If the yolks seeped at all, he would send them back to the kitchen.
James Bond, in Ian Fleming’s novels, eats scrambled eggs like a maniac. Remembering this, I looked up “eggs” on the comprehensive website The James Bond Dossier.
There I found a solid article by David Leigh. So well-known was Bond’s penchant for scrambled eggs, Leigh writes, that a proofreader of “Live and Let Die” noted “the security risk this posed to Bond, writing that whoever was following him need only walk into a restaurant and ask, ‘Was there a man here eating scrambled eggs?’”
How important is a good breakfast? I used to think not very, despite Julia Child’s comment, in her book “Julia Child & More Company,” that Lizzie Borden consumed a dismal breakfast on the morning she grabbed her ax.
All this food talk can make a person feel bourgeois to the max. I tend to agree with Kenneth Tynan, the playwright and critic, who was asked by a friend how he could eat well and still call himself a socialist.
Tynan writes: “I reply, curtly but sincerely, that good food should be available to everyone; socialism which denies the pleasures of the gullet is socialism disfigured by the English puritan tradition.”
I’m trying to start my days more, to use a dread word, mindfully. This way perhaps I can rise with some chic, like Botticelli’s Venus from her half-shell.
Some mornings, during quarantine, I overdo it on breakfast and just climb back into bed. I have committed what the backgammon app on my phone calls a “casual blunder.”
Back under the duvet, I sympathize with the speaker in James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” who said, “I’ve eaten a griddle.”
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