Breakfast

Good Morning! Today I want to talk about breakfast -- an important meal that seems to have slipped away. For me, breakfast is usually a bowl of cereal, or cinnamon toast with lots of sugared cinnamon. That’s not really the sort of breakfast I think my grandparents ate!

Daddy says he likes Mark Twain’s description of the perfect breakfast…

“a mighty porterhouse steak an inch and a half thick, hot and sputtering from the griddle; dusted with fragrant pepper; enriched with little melting bits of butter…; the precious juices of the meat trickling out and joining the gravy, archipelagoed with mushrooms;…and a great cup of American homemade coffee… some smoking hot biscuits, a plate of buckwheat cakes, with transparent syrup…” Doesn’t that sound delicious? I bet if you ate all that for breakfast, you’d have to go back to bed for a while before you could do anything else for the rest of the day!

Daddy makes us French toast sometimes for breakfast, but more often for dinner. He says it’s not really French since it was invented by a man named Joseph French in his tavern in Albany in 1724. It appears he didn’t know of the possessive apostrophe since he listed it on his menu as French toast, rather than French’s Toast. Some have attributed it to the French Canadians who call it pain perdu, which is French for “lost bread”. Whatever! Daddy uses lots of eggs, real cream, and butter, sugar, and a little touch of cinnamon and nutmeg. It’s the best, especially if Daddy uses his homemade French bread! Daddy eats his plain with no syrup, but the rest of us use the whole bottle of Aunt Jemima with ours!

I don’t want to finish without a discussion of bacon, eggs, and sausage. First off, we don’t eat much sausage, but when we do, it’s in Daddy’s grits. His grits are different from Mom’s. Mom makes grits with water and grits. Daddy makes grits with water, salt, butter, and a lot of cream at the end. From the time he puts the grits in the boiling water, until he takes them off the heat, he NEVER stops stirring! He makes scrambled eggs almost the same way. James Beard once said that if he were about to be executed and were given a choice of a last meal, it would be bacon and eggs!

Now bacon takes up another discussion because it is SOOOOO good! Make sure you get some good, thick bacon, and start it in your big black skillet while the skillet is still cold. Let it sizzle until it’s crispy and save the fat it renders to fry chicken in! Eat as much as you can get your hands on as soon as it’s cool enough to snatch from the plate!

Sometimes we have bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches for supper. Tonight we’re having bacon, lettuce, and tomato SALAD!

Here’s my recipe for the perfect BLT.

Get two slices of thick bread and put them in the toaster. Remember to pop the toast up several times while it’s in the toaster to ensure it’s cooking. Get all the other ingredients ready on the counter….Duke’s mayonnaise, big fat slices of tomato, and crispy lettuce. When the toast is done, put it on your plate, then get as many slices of bacon as you can and put it on the toast. Then sit down at the table and wait for the rest of the family to fix theirs. After the blessing, eat each slice of bacon individually until they’re all gone. Ask if you may have another. If the answer is yes, you can skip the toasting part and go directly to putting the bacon on the toast you already have. Sit down and eat each slice. You may repeat this procedure as many times as you are allowed, or until there is no more bacon. At that point, you can give the toast to Heather, and put your plate by the sink.

For Daddy, I’ll end with a quote about the best drink on earth, tea!

“Tea! Thou soft, thou sober, sage, and venerable liquid, thou female tongue-running, smile-soothing, heart-opening, wink-tippling cordial, to whose glorious insipidity I owe the happiest moments of my life, let me fall prostrate.” Colley Cibber in The Lady’s Last Stake. Daddy says, “I know what she means!”

~Hon!