Breakfast: One of My Three Favorite Meals!

with some erudite suggestions

Suddenly, it seems, everyone’s talking about breakfast. It’s clearly the meal of the moment. Of course, all of your mothers probably said, as mine did, you must have a good breakfast to start the day right. Spoken as she sipped her black coffee and crunched her almost-dry toast.

Truly I have learned that there are people in this world for whom eating first thing in the morning is anathema, and others who can’t speak until they’ve had at least a bowl of yogurt, some fruit, perhaps bacon and an egg, and maybe a smoothie to round it all off. And then those like me who love breakfast, love everything about it, but prefer to partake around 10:30 or 11 in the morning, no earlier. Call us brunchies, if you have to call us anything.

I love coffee, I love tea, I do not love orange juice first thing in the morning. I love corned beef hash with two poached eggs on top at Marriner’s Restaurant in downtown Camden, Maine (https://marrinersrestaurant.four-food.com), just as much as I loved the bowl of savory beans called fuul at Abu Abdo’s bean stand in long-ago Aleppo, and the leblebi chickpea stew with its vivid garnishes (scarlet harissa, pale hardboiled eggs, bright yellow salted lemons) served at market stalls along the narrow lanes in Houmt Souq on the island of Djerba, and the astounding breakfast buffets of hotels in Beirut and Istanbul with their arrays of yogurt, olives, flat pita breads, man’ousheh with a za’atar topping, fruit jams and honey, crisp radishes and spring onions, fresh mint and cilantro, wedges of feta-like white cheese called jibne beidha, and a bowl of hummus garnished with olive oil.

Or just a plain soft-boiled egg like the one at the top of the page, taken on the kitchen porch, with a dab of salt, a sprinkle of pepper, a dash of za’atar, and a drop or two of the season’s best olive oil, plus a wedge of well-toasted whole-grain bread.

Gambero Rosso, the popular Italian food magazine, came out recently in favor of “healthy breakfasts”—this in a land where breakfast most often means heavily sugared coffee with milk, a sweet bun or at most toast spread with Nutella, a nutritionist’s nightmare. But GR is on the warpath, recommending such strangely non-Italian breakfast treats as 1) toast with Marmite; 2) yogurt and granola; 3) porridge (that icon of the Scottish diet); and, mirabile dictu, 4) cornflakes and milk! https://www.gamberorossointernational.com/news/breakfast-5-ideas-for-the-weekend/

I cannot envision any of my Italian friends, neighbors, or casual acquaintances sitting down to a bowl of porridge, or even worse, cornflakes and milk.

Cornflakes and their ilk, including Grape-Nuts, culinary historians say, are the origin of the American obsession with breakfast. Invented, famously, by the Kellogg brothers (Corn Flakes) and C. W. Post (Grape-Nuts), they were part of a vegetarian diet promoted by the Seventh Day Adventist Sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, in the late 19th century. Spotting a winner, the Kelloggs and Post invested heavily in advertising and promotion to convince the American public that a) a healthy breakfast was an important start to the day, and b) fast-paced Americans, eager to be up and on the go, would get there quicker with a bowl of cereal lavished with sugar and fresh milk (see Anne Mendelson’s just published Spoiled for the skinny on the latter item). From there to a box of Cocoa Krispies or Froot Loops on every breakfast table in the land was a very short leap.

Tomorrow morning, not too early, my breakfast will be a bowl of leftover butternut squash soup, fragrant with cumin and coconut milk, and sparked with a dollop of miso and another of red pepper paste. We had it for supper tonight. It was made like most pureed vegetable soups, starting with an Italian battuto of onion, celery, carrot, and parsley, all chopped fine and sautéed in olive oil, then a couple of small potatoes to give the broth some bulk, 3 or 4 cups of peeled chunks of squash, and a couple of cups of chicken stock from the freezer. I stirred in the miso and the red pepper paste (another time I might use tomato paste instead), cooked it down till the squash was melting, then stirred in a cup of unsweetened coconut milk, and pureed it with a stick blender. It will be as good for breakfast as it was for supper.

The point? That breakfast doesn’t have to be bacon and eggs, or cornflakes and milk, or toast with peanut butter, or even an anything bagel with a schmear, eaten standing up at the deli counter before going into the office, the way I used to do in New York. Those are all quick, easy, and predictable but it’s just as quick and easy to save part of supper (dinner, if you will) to add to next day’s breakfast.

If the leftovers aren’t quite enough, poach an egg to put on top, or hard boil one to crumble over it. Add a dollop of plain yogurt, the kind we call in this country, for mysterious reasons, Greek yogurt; slice up an avocado to add alongside. Or toast a slice of whole-grain bread, add a glug of good olive oil, and top the toast with last night’s chicken or salmon or greens to make an open-face breakfast sandwich. It’s not that hard, even for fast-paced Americans, ready to be up and on the go, and for another five or ten minutes in the morning, the pleasure is worth it.

And then, on the weekend, when you have more time, treat yourself to one of the most sensational breakfast dishes to come out of the Arab-Israeli breakfast world, shakshouka. Basically, this is a spicy North African sauce in which eggs are poached, steamed, or baked to make a substantial and very tasty breakfast (but it’s equally good for supper or for lunch). On the island of Pantelleria, midway between Sicily and Tunisia, it’s called sciakisciuka and island cooks add some of the delicious Pantelleria capers to the sauce. And if you go to Israel, you’ll find the dish in a restaurant called Dr. Shakshouka, in the heart of the delightfully shabby old city of Jaffa, where it’s sometimes served with fish fillets instead of eggs, a great idea. Make this hotter or sweeter as you wish by increasing or decreasing the ratio of paprika to chili. Another virtue of the sauce: You can make it ahead of time, even several days ahead, and refrigerate until you’re ready to reheat and serve.

This makes enough for two abundant servings and would easily serve four if there were other offerings on the table to accompany it.

• 1 teaspoon cumin seeds

• 6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil plus a little more for garnish

• 4 sweet red (bell) peppers, cored and chopped, not too fine

• 4 to 6 garlic cloves, chopped

• 2 large or 4 medium ripe tomatoes, peeled and chopped not too fine

• 2 tablespoons tomato concentrate

• 1 tablespoon sweet paprika

• 1 or 2 teaspoons medium-hot ground or flaked Turkish red pepper   

• 1 teaspoon ground coriander

• Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

• 1 heaping tablespoon capers, rinsed of excess salt, or more if you wish

• Juice of half a lemon, or more to taste

•  ¼ cup finely chopped flat-leaf parsley

•  ¼ cup finely chopped cilantro

• 4 large eggs

First roast the cumin seeds, tossing them in a dry skillet on high heat, just until the fragrance starts to rise. Remove the skillet from the heat and add the oil, chopped peppers and garlic, stirring to mix it all together. Set the skillet back over medium-low heat and gently sauté the peppers and garlic in oil until the vegetables are very soft, 15 to 20 minutes. Stir in the tomatoes, which will give off quite a lot of liquid. Raise the heat and cook until most of the liquid has evaporated and the sauce has thickened, then stir in the tomato concentrate, along with all the aromatics, including the salt and pepper. Add ½ cup or more of water and cook down over medium heat for another 15 minutes or so to bring all the flavors together and thicken the sauce slightly--like a tomato sauce for pasta. Taste and adjust the seasoning. If you add more chili or paprika, cook down again to get rid of the raw flavor of hot peppers. When the sauce is ready, stir in the capers and a good spritz of lemon juice. At this point, you can refrigerate the sauce if you’re not ready to cook the eggs right away.

When you’re ready to use the sauce, reheat it in the pan over medium-low heat, then stir in the parsley and cilantro. Use a big serving spoon to make four large indentations in the sauce. Crack an egg and drop it into each indentation. Cover the pan and steam the eggs just until they set. Don’t overcook—you want slightly runny eggs to mix in the sauce. Uncover the pan and sprinkle each egg with a little more salt, black pepper, and if you wish more chili pepper. Add a dribble of olive oil over all, with more parsley and cilantro, and serve immediately.

Serve with crusty bread, toasted if you wish, for scooping up the sauce.