Breakfast and Brunch Breakfast, once the most ordinary of meals, has become big business. When I was growing up, weekday breakfast meant oatmeal, farina, and, sometimes, Wheatena. The dominant cold cereals were Cheerios, cornflakes, and Rice Krispies. Eggs, which occasionally stood in for cereal, were poached, sunny-side up, or scrambled (whoever heard of omelets in those days?), and lay on the plate beside bacon or sausage, toast or English muffin. New Yorkers were the only ones who had even heard of lox and bagels. The only really exotic breakfast item was eggs Benedict. Of course, in the South they loved their grits, scrapple, and fried fish.
But after thirty years of food and diet fads, new ethnic tastes, and the variety of choices supermarkets now offer for breakfasts on the run, breakfast is a new and exciting experience. Manufacturers have developed more than fifty kinds of cold cereal alone in the last ten years; instant oatmeal, breakfast bars, kashi, frozen waffles, instant cocoa with marshmallows, and breakfast smoothies packed with a whole day’s supply of vitamins and minerals are all readily available. Wander today through the breakfast section of a supermarket and you’ll find biscuits, croissants, sticky buns in a tube (just open, pull apart, bake, and serve) exactly like homemade (well, not quite, but close enough for many shoppers).
In his book The Great Good Place, Ray Oldenburg laments the fact that there are too few places in America to visit with friends or find some inner quiet. With cold, impersonal malls and copycat restaurants moving people in and out as quickly as possible, until recently it was hard to find somewhere that welcomed you to just sit awhile.
But in many cities, a countermovement is trying to slow the pace of breakfast. Starbucks, reproducing at a rabbit’s pace, independent coffee shops, and even teahouses are popping up all over, offering a place to sip coffee or tea peacefully, to write, to meet friends.
In New York City, Maury Rubin thinks of his City Bakery as rekindling the neighborhood meeting place. “When I came back from Paris in 1987, I was obsessed with creating a place where people could have yogurt, oatmeal, granola, great baked goods, and, of course, good coffee,” he said over coffee in his bakery. “It was the very last days of neighborhood bakeries here, like Greenberg and Dumas. The old guard was dying out, and no one thought of replacing them with new blood.”
Hotels and restaurants have also discovered the charm and profit of breakfast as a full-fledged meal. “The power breakfast at the Regency Hotel [in New York City] is a sober hour for tycoons to start dealing over coffee and granola,” Michael Batterberry, editor of Food Arts magazine, told me. San Francisco also has its power breakfast. In 1983, when chef Bradley Ogden opened Campton Place, he put such dishes on his breakfast menu as blue cornmeal pancakes (page 32) and sour cherry muffins, as well as old-fashioned oatmeal and cocoa. At Zov’s Bistro, an Armenian-inspired restaurant in Orange County, open for three meals a day, I tasted delicious scrambled eggs with fresh feta cheese, tomatoes, and basil, served with Armenian sausage in a tortilla.
In some families, breakfast is the one meal of the day when the entire family can eat together. “We have breakfast together because we don’t have time to eat dinner together,” said Helen Pearson of Chevy Chase, Maryland, a mother of two. “It’s easy to get up a half hour earlier. What we eat is not as essential as that we have time to talk.” Like many mothers, Helen is busy and often buys ready-made sausage patties and biscuits in a tube. She fries the sausage, scrambles the eggs, and makes sandwiches of them, which she serves with cut-up fruit. She also prepares grits and cheese with bacon or sausage.
Then there’s brunch, that wonderful meal peculiar to America that gives us time to slow down on nonwork days and savor our food. Although this late-morning meal combining breakfast and lunch has been around for years, it has now taken the place of the more formal Sunday lunch. At hotels, brunch can include anything, from omelets to a whole roast pig that I saw at one such meal. Brunch can also be quite simple, with a few items like huevos rancheros (page 26), French toast casserole (page 25), and fresh fruit salad (page 15). Eggs are served in a variety of ways: Japanese-style, filled with healthful greens (page 22), or Chinese egg foo yung (page 24), among many others.
No one seems to eat ordinary pancakes anymore; now it’s Ogden’s blue cornmeal pancakes and ricotta pancakes with lemon and poppy seeds (page 31). Supermarkets and bakeries sell sourdough baguettes as well as oversize, multiflavored muffins, bagels, scones, and croissants. These days scones are flavored with cardamom and ginger (page 38), bagels are covered with all kinds of seeds (page 33), and quick breads include banana with macadamia nuts (page 39). Tropical smoothies (page 18) are all the rage, as well as Asian dim sum (page 113), South American burritos filled with eggs and beans, Vietnamese hearty meat soups (pages 154), and breakfast buns of all persuasions, expanding our global menu to farther and farther reaches.
The recipes here reflect my discoveries across the country in the last few years. If you are planning a brunch, look in the Bread, Salad, and Vegetable chapters for more ideas.
Granola from Emandal Farm
Granola is one of those breakfast items that we take for granted these days. Although it’s been around since Sylvester Graham’s health movement in the nineteenth century, crunchy granola became very popular in the 1970s when a freelance baker named Layton Gentry—called by many Johnny Granola-Seed—experimented with recipes to develop what is known today as crunchy granola and sold it to supermarkets across America. At a time when healthy breakfast cereals like Swiss muesli were coming into vogue, granola was often served with the new accompaniment called yogurt instead of milk.
Jenny Guillaume, program coordinator of the Washington Youth Garden at the U.S. National Arboretum, uses granola to teach inner-city children what to do with the pumpkin and sunflower seeds they harvest from their arboretum garden. Jenny learned to make this formula at Emandal, a farm at a children’s camp in California, where she prepared it for breakfast with farm-fresh yogurt. Your hands may get sticky mixing it, but that’s part of the fun.
yield: about 14 cups
1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
2. Toss the oats, coconut, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, walnuts, and almonds in a large bowl, with your hands. Drizzle on the honey and
b cup of the vegetable oil, blending them with the seeds and nuts. Add more vegetable oil if needed. Spread the granola out in 2 jelly-roll pans.
3. Bake in the oven for about 20–30 minutes, until golden brown, stirring the granola with a spatula every 10 minutes and reversing the pans halfway through the baking time. Remove from the oven, stir in the raisins, if desired, and let cool. Store in an airtight container.
Breakfast Fruit Salad with Ginger and Mint
I especially like this breakfast salad inspired by one that I ate at Prune, a tiny, homey restaurant on New York’s Lower East Side. The fruits you use can change with the season. If you don’t want to bother with ginger syrup, just sprinkle crystallized ginger over the fruit.
yield: about 8 servings
1. To make the syrup, put the water, sugar, and gingerroot in a saucepan. Bring to a boil and simmer uncovered to reduce the liquid by half, for about 20 minutes. Set aside.
2. To make the fruit salad, toss the apple, blueberries, honeydew, cantaloupe, and grapes together in a large bowl. Add a few tablespoons of the ginger syrup and sprinkle the mint on top.
Pomegranate, Mango, and Papaya Fruit Salad with Lime
The only challenge with tropical fruits like pomegranates and mangoes is learning how to cut them, a skill that I have described below. If a pomegranate is supposed to be a symbol of fruitfulness and a papaya is good for whatever ails your stomach, what happens in this salad? Taste it and see!
yield: 6 servings
1. To peel the pomegranate without staining yourself with juice, gently score the outer skin in quarters. Then place the entire pomegranate in a large bowl filled with water. With your hands under the water, gently pull off the skin and remove the arils (the seeds, with their fleshy covering), which will fall to the bottom. Drain off the water and discard everything but the arils. Dab them dry and leave on paper towels until ready to serve. You can also cut the pomegranate in two, then holding one half in your hand with seeds down over a bowl, whack the outer shell with a mixing spoon, letting the seeds fall through your hands and into the bowl. Keep whacking the shell until all the seeds are out; remove any pith that falls into the bowl. Repeat with the other half of the pomegranate.
2. Cut the papaya in half, scoop out the seeds, and reserve them if you like. Score the papaya in long strips, then score the strips in half. Gently remove the pieces with a spoon and combine them with the cut-up mango.
3. Sprinkle the fruit with the lime juice and honey, then dot with b cup of the pomegranate seeds. (If you have more, eat them as a snack.)
* Pomegranates can be stored whole in the refrigerator for up to a year. You may also substitute dried cranberries or cherries for the fresh pomegranate arils.
Mango Lassi from the Mango Man
Richard Campbell, whose job is to oversee about 250 varieties of mangoes from around the world at Fairchild Gardens in Coral Gables, Florida, doesn’t just eat mangoes. He inhales their aroma and savors their flesh with almost every meal. Mango salads, mango juice, and mango lassi start his day. Dried mangoes are his snack, glacéed mango his candy, green mangoes his salad. He uses mango chutney on flatbread for lunch, squeezes a mango and lemon to marinate meat, and feeds his bread starter with mango juice. Mangoes perfume his house, and one of his children hugged a tiny mango as a security blanket.
One of the most beloved smoothies in America today is the Indian mango lassi, a mango drink with yogurt. Although fresh mango and homemade yogurt are used in India, most Indian restaurants here use canned sweetened mango imported from India.
yield: 2 servings
1. Peel the mangoes, following the instructions in the box on page 17.
2. Put the yogurt, mango pieces, water, ice cubes, sugar, and salt in a blender. Process until smooth. Pour into 2 glasses and serve.
California Date Shake
For years I wanted to taste a date shake. I knew I would have to go to California’s Coachella Valley, located in the southern desert near Palm Springs, to try the genuine article. Accompanied by my cousin Bill Bloch, who has been coming to the desert since 1946, we found Shields Date Gardens, a nondescript white wooden building flanked by date palms on Highway 111 in Indio, California. Bill said that in the early days, all you could see for miles around was date palms.
Not indigenous to the California desert, dates were first introduced to the New World by Spanish missionaries in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although most of the world’s dates still come from the Middle East, California produces 99 percent of the U.S. crop, the majority being two varieties: medjool, meaning “unknown” in Arabic and called by many the “Cadillac” of dates; and deglet noor, meaning “finger of light.”
According to Juanita Barbo Ottoman, now in her eighties, who has been making date shakes for the past sixty-plus years, the drink originated during World War II. In those days there was no air conditioning in the desert, and little ice cream was available during the war. Since it was hot, people wanted cold drinks. So someone came up with the idea of combining frozen milk, a little vanilla, and some dates for thickening and flavor.
Having tasted date shakes throughout Palm Desert, and then playing around with the recipe at home, I prefer this version, made, ideally, with fresh dates.
yield: 2 shakes
Cut the dates into small pieces. Put them in a blender with the frozen yogurt, milk, and ice cubes and blend until smooth. Pour into a tall glass and serve.
Breakfast in the Foothills of the Ozarks
When I started working on this book, I wanted to visit a part of the country where,
I thought, maybe nothing had changed in the past thirty years. I suspected I would find that in Fox, Arkansas, but Marion Spear, who prepared breakfast for me in her hideaway home there, proved me wrong.
An herbalist, Marion teaches herbal cooking at the Ozark Folk Center in nearby Mountain View, the old-time country music capital of the world. To get to her house, at the bottom edge of the Ozark plateau, she drove me down the rockiest dirt road I had ever been on.
Her cookbook collection alone should have given me a hint about her: Diana Kennedy, André Simon, and James Beard. “I like James Beard because he gives you a basic recipe and lots of cooking possibilities, then he turns you loose, he sets you free,” said Marion.
An experienced home brewer, Marion has papered her kitchen with colorful labels from the sides of six-packs. Jars of pickled eggs, hot pepper jelly, and wild plum shrub line the walls. Iron skillets decorate another wall in front of a Home Comfort Range stove made in 1881, which Marion told me cost $37 new. Always up for an adventure, she often packs her stove on a truck for demonstrations of cornmeal doughnuts for the Ozarks Foothills
Handicrafts Guild.
As we talked, she prepared the greens for our breakfast omelet from her latest
inspiration, Japanese cooking. She ran out to the garden and cut some arugula, mustard greens, and cilantro that were growing near the bok choy and other Asian greens, all good winter vegetables. “I’m a top-of-the-stove, scratch cook,” she said apologetically. She turned on an electric skillet and poured the eggs in. Then she piled the greens on top and steamed them in the eggs. She served the omelet with a grilled bagel and her pepper jelly—it was a breakfast I will never forget.
Omelet with Mixed Greens and Cilantro
This delectable omelet tastes best with absolutely fresh herbs and vegetables steamed in a thin layer of egg in a minimal amount of oil. You can substitute spinach, dill, basil, or parsley for the herbs, and bitter greens and tomatoes for the mushrooms. Serve the omelet alone for brunch or for lunch with, if you want, fresh homemade salsa and bread. Although Marion uses a rectangular nonstick electric frying pan, I make it in a ten-inch nonstick frying pan.
yield: 2–3 servingsCopyright © 2005 by Joan Nathan