Breakfast, now there’s a topic, the first meal of the day and the one least pondered and most enjoyed. Every nation has its local breakfast favorites, including a few where the specialty is nothing, literally nothing at all.
In Rome, ancient or modern, breakfast is not much.
Italy that beloved and beautify land does not do breakfast. Italians don’t eat it and the don’t capish’ breakfast either. They have a name for it, primo collazione, they just don’t eat it. This goes back to ancient Roman times. A Roman would drop his feet out of bed and right into his sandals. Then he would wash his hands and face in cold water, rinse his mouth after seeing to his teeth with a special kind of malleable twig (just like most modern Hindus) then he would drop a tunic -- sort of long t-shirt that fell to his knees -- over his head tie it with a belt and bang, it was then off to work. If he was an important fellow, his wife or valet would drape his white wool toga around him, he would receive morning calls from his “clients” and catch up on gossip and lay a little walking around money on those who needed some. Then he was off to the forum for legal business after a courtesy call at his patron’s house on the way. Everybody except the Emperor had a patron above him and clients below. During the morning he might have a bread roll with a piece of cheese or ham, (it is a panini today) or a whatever fruit was in season or a handful of dried fruit. Finally around one thirty he would stop his work or business and head home for cena (the principal meal of the day). After sunset Romans would have a bowl of soup or a salad and fruit if it was warm. No breakfast, like many modern Americans, the Romans didn't have the time or interest in eating early in the day. The most Italians still don’t. Some strong coffee, but eat something: no. The latte which younger Americans have come to love is strictly a morning beverage in Italy where nobody ever orders one after midday. They can and do cheat late morning with a snack, like what the English call “eleven's.”
A traditional English breakfast, sitting on a tatami floor mat in a kimono.
The Japanese and most east Asians eat a light breakfast of rice porridge - - jook or con gee to the Chinese -- along with some dried salt fish and pickled vegetables -- not something that would charm many foreigners. Now the Japanese have long studied the world with great care and close attention to every detail. When they judged something was the best they have appropriated it for themselves, often improving it in the process. They took the battered fried fish of the Portuguese 500 years ago and refined it into feather light “tempura.” They studied all the whiskeys of the world and their leading distillery Suntory now makes a fine whiskey that tastes more Scotch than the real thing. However, as is so often the case in Japan, unexpectedly a real world class breakfast does exist if you are staying in a traditional Japanese inn. In these ryokan you will be offered a traditional English breakfast. This is God’s own truth. A staff member in a kimono will appear with a tray with pots of strong black tea and hot milk, a bowl of oatmeal porridge, fried “back” bacon, two eggs fried sunny side up in the bacon fat and cold toast with marmalade.
A good example of a traditional English Breakfast.
from It is a simple and well known story that brought this British staple to Japan. In the early 1920’s a squadron of the Imperial Navy was detailed to take the Crown Prince and his brother on a world tour. In England the two princes were invited to stay with King George V and his family. They were deeply impressed by sharing a hearty English breakfast around the table with simple family style informality. His Royal Highness George V, by the grace of God, King of England, Ireland and Scotland, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India and the Dominions beyond the Seas, assured his guests that starting the day with a solid filling English breakfast gave you the strength and conviction to carry on through the day no matter what happened. It should be remembered that until Britain gave way to heavy American pressure in the mid 1920’s, Japan had long been Britain’s most reliable Asian ally. The Japanese admired the UK as a near prefect model for an ambitious developing island nation. In a rare newspaper interview while he was in Britain, the Crown Prince told the Japanese people how he had taken the fatherly advice of King George to heart and henceforth he would begin his day like the British monarch with a large English Breakfast. Whoosh with the suddenness of an earthquake every Japanese man wanted to join in too. Even the otherwise ultra traditional Japanese Inns began to serve an authentic English Breakfast.
Apparently for this and other reasons the Japanese retain a devotion to the memory of King George V. Fifteen years ago my wife and daughter and I were having dinner in the vast dinning room of the Empress Hotel in Victoria British Columbia. On the back wall in golden frames were a pair of larger than life size portraits of King George V in a Mountie uniform and his spouse Queen Mary. As we ate our dinner, through the main door came an escorted group of forty or more middle aged Japanese tourists. The tour leader lined them up in three rows at the edge of the large dance floor and then shouted a command in Japanese and all the tourists bowed low three times to the royal portraits. It surprised us and it amazed the Canadian diners and waiters who looked on befuddled that the Japanese clearly still rendered royal honors even to dimly remembered monarchs. We tended to forget that technically Canada is still a monarchy and legally is a self governing Dominion of the English crown.
Portuguese American breakfast of fresh cheese, hard tack and strong coffee.
My Portuguese American grandparent’s favorite breakfast was unusual in this country. It was strong coffee served with fresh homemade “farmer’s” cheese, soft lightly salted and still retaining the sweetness of the milk eaten with hardtack, small round hard ship's bread or “sea biscuit.” When I was a child it was still baked somewhere back in New England and shipped in barrels to California where it could be bought at the one of the stalls at the huge Crystal Palace market in San Francisco and a few grocery stores and bakeries that served the Portuguese American community. This is the round thick hard as stone sea biscuit that their ancestors had taken to sea from New Bedford and the Açores when fishing or whaling. Even after dunking in the strong black coffee the hardtack was a best chewy. I never got the taste for hard tack, although I can still remember the slightly sour yet sweet fresh white cheese. On Sunday mornings my grandmother would bake a round
morcella - - a sausage made from pork blood, onions, watercress and rice seasoned with cinnamon, cumin, garlic and paprika. It is the Portuguese version of the Mexican and Spanish sausage of the same name, of the French
boudim noir, Polish
kaszanka and the Black Pudding of the British Isles. While the Italians make a blood sausage it includes raisins and sometimes pine nuts which makes it sweeter and milder and being Italian not intended for breakfast.
Polish kaszanka blood sausage. (KA-shan-KA)
Morcella or anyother blood sausage is a dish that truly separates paisanos from everybody else. People not familiar with it will always remember it since it causes guarantees two days of the worse heartburn they ever had. It sits inert in their gut like a cinnamon, garlic, paprika flavored brick. It should be approached with the greatest caution if you are not familiar with it.
Bacon makes the breakfast.
There are many great breakfasts in the world, an Irish farm breakfast cooked over a turf fire with the mystic rich cinnamon musky smell of the burning peat filling the air with along with the heavy smell of dark strong aromatic Irish tea. In England at Bury St. Edmund's I had a breakfast of Suffolk sweet pickle bacon and eggs. This is the finest bacon in the world, marinated in black malt vinegar, treacle (molasses) and spices before smoking. It is even more majestic than the hard Hungarian paprika smoked bacon or tidewater Virginia’s finest bacon.
The Australian Breakfast, fit for real blokes and heroes.
In Australia you can begin your day with the most manly of all fast breaking meals -- a Sydney side Breakfast of thin beef steak topped with two fried eggs and surrounded by a dozen small perfect pan fried Sydney Rock Oysters -- the ethereal essence of brine and sea foam. It must be a southern hemisphere thing, topping beefsteak with fried eggs. It is common in both Chile, Argentina and Uruguay too. After this meal you are ready to take on the world and ready to sing every verse and chorus of The Wild Colonial Boy. After this meal and a couple mugs of dark brown tea you know in your heart that Australia really is God’s own country. Where else could you get this many meal and also eat a plate of ripe tropical fruit fresh from the tropical fields and orchards of Queensland, Australia’s northeast corner.
Hangtown Fry, a Gold Rush icon.
In San Francisco while few places will serve it for breakfast anymore, you can have America’s take on the Australian breakfast for lunch at the fish houses like Tadish’s and Sam’s. I’m talking about Hangtown Fry, a survivor from the Gold Rush era. It is two or three very thick rashers of bacon and a dozen pan fried oysters tucked inside a three egg omelet. A bit more civilized than the Sydney side breakfast but still one great load of protein and the making it a day where you are ready for whatever they send your your way.
Of course there are every sort of pancakes: In New England served with amber maple syrup, in Dixie with the more gamy tasting sorghum syrup. In Oregon they serve them with dark thick tannin zesty blackberry syrup. In the upper Midwest they make the delicate wide thin Scandinavian griddle cakes with butter and tart little lingonberry or home made cranberry jam.
New England has salty as hell but savory red flannel hash. In New York the favorite breakfast is Nova Scotia lox and cream cheese on fresh plain salt water bagels. In Philadelphia you get Scrapple with your eggs and toast. If you want a very sophisticated breakfast you can go to New Orleans and order Eggs Sardou named after the French playwright who wrote the story for Puccini’s Tosca. You also can get Eggs Hussar, or the more commonplace Eggs Benedict or Florentine. In more down to earth southern places your eggs will come with grits -- which to me is “southern” for what is called polenta in San Francisco.
Huevos made a great breakfast.
Huevos Rancheros as traditionally served in northern Mexico.
Mexico also is nation of great breakfasts. As any native Angelino knows, on Sunday mornings you can easily get a big bowl of menudo, the tripe homey soup beloved as the Breakfast of Champions. Mexican Americans claim it is a sovereign hangover cure. In Chicago the Poles make flacki with the same curative potency but made with potatoes, onions and tripe without any chilies. Ironically, this is only one of the many cultural tastes and values shared by these two communities, but that is a separate subject. Both nations came late to a particularly ferocious form of Catholicism, have an icon of the Madonna as a national symbol, a deep and strong sense of aggrieved nationalism, a fascination with death and martyrdom, a stubborn sense of identity, a love for festivals, dancing polkas and drinking beer and clear distilled spirits. Both people are legendary hard workers and take work with a seriousness lacking in most communities. Today in Chicago there are at least three trilingual bands that play rustic polka music for parties and weddings. English, Spanish & Polish lyrics are sung and many of the songs share the same melodies.
Here in Los Angeles there are any number of fancy or homey places that make the most life affirming breakfast --- huevos rancheros. This is a heroic meal, a platter of hot re fried pinto beans and three fried eggs topped with a zesty salsa and eaten with three or four fresh hot corn tortillas. There is a more upscale version of this called chillaqules -- where the salsa and eggs are scrambled with crisps corn chips and maybe some fresh lime juice. There is also huevos con choizo, where the eggs are cooked with spicy pork sausage and huevos con machaca, eggs cooked with onions, chilies and salty dried chopped beet. The simplest Mexican breakfast is a cup of cafe olla (coffee sweetened with raw sugar and cinnamon) and a piece of pan dolce or perhaps a cup of thick foamy Mexican hot chocolate (champarado) and a long churro, deep fried pastry.
There are three old joints in LA where you can get a real American breakfast. At Philippe’s you get your eggs and homemade fried potatoes served with light hot biscuits. At the Original Pantry a robust very old fashioned American breakfast is served with hot cakes or buckwheat cakes if you want them instead of well grilled potatoes. Finally at Musso & Franks are their signature “flannel cakes.” As big around as the wide plate, light as a cloud and hardly thicker than a sheet of writing paper. A real masterpiece and worth the trip, especially on a lazy June Saturday morning when the fog just hangs on and hangs on and LA does a good if palm lined imitation of Seattle.
And you, I know you have your favorite breakfasts ranging from a platter of fresh tropical fruit in a Hawaiian honeymoon suite to a zesty plate of curried County Captain or kedgeree served in a more stuffy than necessary little hotel in tidewater Virginia or a B & B in a village in the Cotswold's in England.
Poached eggs on toasted sour dough bread.
Coffee & hot pastries on the Oakland ferryboat.
The Southern Pacific Railroad's steam ferry Berkeley at the Ferry Building before WW II, from an old postcard.
If you are old as I am, you might just remember the great coffee and hot Snails (archaic San Francisco slang for what is generally called a “Danish.”) and Bear Claws served on the upper deck galley of the black and white Southern Pacific double ended steam ferries that crossed San Francisco Bay from the Ferry Building to the Oakland Mole until 1958. The hot fresh pastries were a specialty of the ferry boats. During the summer before they were withdrawn from service my father took me and some friends to San Francisco where we boarded the
San Leandro for the trip to Oakland. He wanted us to experience a breakfast on board with the boat swaying slightly on the waves and the deck vibrating with the pulse of the steam pistons turning the drive shaft. He took us up to the second deck and we had coffee and pastries as the boat steamed through the light misty fog under the Bay Bridge to the ancient wooden "Oakland Mole" which was a Victorian train shed way out on a pier where the trains made their final stop. The passengers then walked down the platform to the ferry slips and the short voyage across the Bay to San Francisco. At the end of shed you walked under a very large round stained glass window which glowed in the afternoon sun with a huge Southern Pacific logo of railroad tracks leading into the Sunset. Before the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge were opened dozens of black and white ferries steamed back and forth across the bay to Oakland, Berkeley and half a dozen other cities. The landing of the ferry into its slip was great to watch from the rail just below the pilot house. When the boat headed into the wooden walled slip it coasted until it skidded off the wooden retaining wall on one side or the other with a loud scraping sound and once firmly inside the funnel shaped slip the front prop under the bow went into reverse and braked the boat with a huge surge of water just before the bow touched the end of the slip and the entire boat shuddered as the wooden pilings and wooden sides of slip groaned and screached. You can still experience this on New York's Statten Island ferry and on many of Washington State ferries running in and out of Seattle.
The lunch counter on a ferryboat in the late 1930s.
Perhaps you love Yorkshire kippers or Parisian Omelet de fines herbs. Maybe it’s just toast with tart Dundee marmalade or bread with sweet Danish butter and fruit preserves. Whatever it might be you have had great and lousy breakfasts and can remember them too. An American girl who spent a summer at the University of Krakow never got used to a Polish breakfast being exactly the same a Polish lunch, something that is the rule there and in most of Germany and the Scandinavian nations.
In northern Europe breakfast sometimes includes Roll Mops, pickled herring rapped around a dill pickle, not something most Americans would like to see before lunch.
In Norway many hotels will serve an "English" Breakfast to people who are flat out horrified by a local Viking breakfast of smoked and picked fish with rye bread.
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