by Brian Brett
When I’m not writing or there’s an emergency repair in the morning I find that breakfast after a few hours’ labour has more joy than just stuffing the stomach within a half-hour of waking up, and rushing off to work. Besides, as the French say—hunger is the best sauce.
I BOIL A RIDICULOUS mush. We even have a spurtle—a carved Scottish stick designed to stir mush, which you are supposed to stir clockwise with your right hand or you’ll invoke the devil. Living on the bounty of the raincoast economy I make a show-off breakfast cereal for my health-fanatic friends and family. It consists of rolled and quarter-cut oats, cracked wheat, barley and wheat berries in various stages of cracking and baking (like bulgur or kasha), quinoa, pumpkin seeds, cracked flax and millet, sunflower seeds, and amaranth in small quantities. If it’s a grain it’s in there. Then later, when the grains are cooked, I add raisins and chunks of apple. It’s so rich that Sharon practically goes cross-eyed trying to digest a small bowl. I tell her that’s because she doesn’t eat it standing up with a bone spoon, the way a good Scot should. When I eat my mush with brown sugar and heart-clogging milk and butter, I almost feel guilty, remembering the boring quick oatmeal porridges of my childhood. Also, I know what I jokingly refer to as my “death porridge” is a symptom of globalization. I might be poor by the standards of my wealthier neighbours—fighting to pay the endless debts of a poet—but I’m also pillaging the world, and if I had any real moral qualities I’d be eating my flatted oats cold and plain with water, as a health-conscious friend does, to my horror. Actually, I have several friends who have dodged the standard quick-fix cholesterol medications just by cutting out the fats and sticking to porridge in the morning. It scours the stomach clean.
Generally, we lean toward a Western breakfast, yet I sometimes veer into a version of the dawn meals I ate in the cheap hotels in Beijing, where I was served a boiled millet, cooked all night in enormous pots and flavoured with a weak broth, alongside thin-sliced preserved vegetables that resemble miniature, pickled kohlrabi mutations but are a form of mustard stem, and a flat lump of fried dough. Sharon glances at this meal and flees the kitchen. It looks and sounds disgusting, yet the combination of flavours is exquisite. Its origins are ancient.
If I describe this breakfast to North Americans they invariably react with the same suspicion as Sharon, but I have different food values. I’m still notorious for too enthusiastically hurling a box of Froot Loops out the kitchen window while the startled kids watched in horror. Even the crows wouldn’t eat that cereal, and it took days to decay in the backyard. I’ve become a little calmer over the years, and now I figure you can eat your strange food if I can eat mine, but I still wouldn’t wish that stuff on children.
I had the unfortunate experience, several months ago, of visiting a superstore while I was in a small city on Vancouver Island. I thought I’d renew my millet supply. To my shock, no one knew what millet was, and the store certainly didn’t stock it. Such is the fate of one of humankind’s earliest crops—breakfast, lunch, and dinner for millions. Finally, on my third try with the staff, an elderly store clerk’s eyes lit up. “Oh, you mean food for birds.”
“No,” I said. “I mean food for me.”
She gave me a suspicious look and politely got rid of me. It was apparent I had to find the sole organic-grain supplier in town.
BREAKFAST WAS ONCE A sip of water at a stream and some scratchy grasses from the south side of a hill. Since then, it’s evolved, like the rest of our inventions—faster than we have. Early hunter-gatherer societies picked at leftover grains and roots scooped from their leather storage bags or chugged down a few seeds when the day began. After we stopped dragging chunks of burnt meat from the fire and nibbling on barely washed roots, breakfast evolved into leftover mushes and gruels in the first subsistence farming communities, whose breakfasts were equally boring.
One can only wonder how many generations of farmers glared at their cold barley mush until someone said, “I need an egg.” Thus began the evolution from those first tasteless quick gulps before a day in the hardscrabble field to the Dutch seventeen-course breakfast that would probably give an Afghani farmer a heart attack. A statistical study shows that what’s now regarded as the traditional breakfast by a middle-class Swedish family involves so many trade and food miles that the earth must be circumnavigated every day in order for that family to sit down to eat.
That ancient, leftover gruel has changed hugely and often for the worse. The world’s poor have even less to eat, and in North America the Walmart generation eats a different cereal altogether: immense quantities of grain are now boiled, beaten, and dried, then pressed into nutrition-free ornamental shapes—the taste provided at the end of the manufacturing process by an artificial flavour factory in an industrial park. North Americans are also eating on the run, either at home or idling in the drive-by at the local fast-food franchise—pumping artificial flavour, sugar, fat, salt, and a spike of caffeine into their bloodstreams.
HISTORICALLY, LOCAL CROPS MADE for a great diversity of breakfasts that became even more diverse during the era of exploration and world trade that began in the Renaissance. But free trade and the globalization of the multinationals during the past fifty years is now shrinking breakfast fare. Still, breakfasts around the world demonstrate the magic of local produce supplemented by imported foods. Oh, what strange breakfasts we have grown and still eat. There’s falafel, the deep-fried fava bean or chickpea mashes of the Mideast, wrapped in khubz bread and slathered in yogourt. In Africa it’s cassava or corn gruel with coconuts and bananas. Cornmeal gruel, uji, is often mixed with ground peanuts. In Madagascar you might snack on kitoza—dried beef grilled over charcoal—along with your gruel. And in Cameroon you can eat an omelette confected with beans, sardines, and eggs.
West, across the Atlantic, you can drink tascalate, hot chocolate with ground pine nuts, sugar, and vanilla. The magnificent huevos rancheros are eggs with fried tomatoes; huevos motulenos are refried beans, scrambled eggs, ham, peas, and cheese wrapped up in a corn tortilla. Costa Ricans eat gallo pinto, or spotted rooster—fried rice and black beans served with sour cream and fried eggs. In Bolivia there’s the salteña, a pastry filled with chopped hard-boiled eggs, raisins, olives, peas, and meat. Farther south you can have a submarino—steamed milk rich with a melted bittersweet-chocolate bar.
Mushy rice has colonized Eurasia and spread to Africa and Spain. Wild strains exist on every continent except Antarctica. The breakfast of the Chinese farmer usually revolves around leftover rice congee or noodles. I love rice slightly burnt brown in the pot, soaked overnight in a weak chicken broth and eaten, warmed up, with soy sauce in the morning. The same for the gooey noodles. The Japanese sometimes top their breakfast rice with green onions, salmon, ginger-pickled fruit, or roe, flavouring it with chicken stock or miso, as I do. They call this okayu.
Soybean milk-soup. Turnip cakes. Century eggs. Parma ham. Injera (a flatbread). Steamed buns stuffed with sweet red beans. I’ve made tofu French toast for vegan friends. Fermented soybeans. The halva of Pakistan—a sweet made from semolina. Alloo cholay—a spicy chickpea and potato curry with nan bread. Garlic fried rice. Pork tocino (caramelized). Marmalade, fried green tomatoes, waffles, pancakes (flour or potato). Cooked sugar-beet spread. Nut butters. Muesli. Granola. Thousands upon thousands of jams and jellies. Our hunger for diversity is as great as our hunger.
Knowing all this, I am almost embarrassed to admit that Sharon and I often succumb to a simple Western-style breakfast. I try to make my own bacon and have a smoker for that purpose. The same with bread. There’s nothing like home-baked whole wheat or rye bread, still warm, with butter and handmade jams. Throw in some spiced Yukon Gold potatoes and tomatoes and soft-boiled eggs, along with the home-smoked bacon, and we’re in heaven. Sharon eats earlier than I do, yet we still manage to meet for a quick sit-down breakfast a few days a week. Companionship is a fine spice.
Every second year I make marmalade, but the making of marmalade has beco
me such a lost art that Seville oranges appear at our local market for only a few days. You need a sixth sense to know when they have arrived, so you can beat the last marmalade fanatics to the oranges. One year Sharon stumbled upon them and decided to make her own marmalade because mine was always too lumpy and dark. Hers was light and runny, which horrified me, so I rushed out and managed to rustle up the last scungy oranges. Naturally mine came out even darker and lumpier and more unspreadable than usual. So now we have Mama and Papa Bear marmalades, and in truth, the best would be the combination of the two. Still, we aren’t stuck with the flavoured sugar-water that passes for marmalade these days.
I KEEP RETURNING TO the egg. Maybe because it’s so central to my North American diet. It’s my local food, and the other breakfasts are merely an exhibition of my need for exotica. With the egg, I have undergone a lifetime quest for its use in every meal. Since I was a child and had six hens in the backyard, I’ve studied the behaviour and breeds of the chicken and still attempt different methods for growing a proper egg. How do we address the egg? Over thousands of years humanity has learned to put hard-boiled eggs in curry, fry up chicks half grown, or whip whites into desserts. Oh, the banana cream pie with its lightly browned meringue! Egg-drop soup. Cakes. Eggs scrambled with truffles. Egg breads. Scotch eggs. The egg is a paintbrush used to illustrate the enormous range of the human diet. Like tofu, it has the ability to absorb the recipes it’s cooked with, and unlike tofu, it is coveted in almost every culture.
Cooking an egg is a way we judge ourselves. We say of a poor cook, “He doesn’t know how to boil an egg!” Although boiling an egg is an art and a trial, especially when you have eggs of such diverse density, shape, and size as today’s varieties. Consider the histrionic excesses that people will put into boiling a “just right” soft-boiled egg—a near-fetish object in Western society. It’s a lifelong trial for Sharon, who has a knack for cooking every variation except soft-boiled. I usually cook a good egg, but I’m so absent-minded that I tend to forget they’re ready, which always earns me a snort of contempt at breakfast because Sharon is so competitive about the eggs. Even a hard-boiled has its demands. Here at Trauma Farm our eggs are too fresh to peel. So we plan our hard-boiled dishes like potato salad a week in advance. The interior air pocket expands with age, and the protective skin between the egg and the shell dries, allowing the egg to be peeled aesthetically when it’s several days old.
You can’t make an omelette without cracking an egg, and a real egg is a lovely creation. I can tell what a chicken has been eating and how it’s been raised when I break an egg on the frying pan. The best yolks are a deep orange, almost red. A good yellow yolk derives from corn, which is included in hen scratch. Factory manufacturers generally add dye to food pellets to yellow the yolk. And you have to keep a wary eye out for today’s “organic” factory eggs, because some feed manufacturers jazz up the mash with enough canola oil, high-protein alfalfa, and soy meal to give both the chicken meat and the egg a fishy smell and taste.
Orange yolks come from eating lots of insects, which chickens love. That’s why the rooster will cluck when he finds a treasure of bugs, and the hens will come a-running. Interestingly, if hens discover something delicious, they will eat silently—greedy-gut girls that they are. Chickens are scavengers and will eat almost anything. I’ve fed them the intestines of livestock I’ve slaughtered. They go wild over that, as do traditional Inuit, who balance out their meaty diets with the stomach contents of caribou.
An unfertilized egg is a single cell. An unfertilized ostrich egg is the largest single cell on earth. The white is thick in a fresh real egg and doesn’t slime all over the pan like the store-bought ones—especially since the white becomes thinner as the egg ages. A good diet, freedom, and the sun make both the yolk and the white firmer and more nutritious. We also feed our chickens crushed oyster shells scavenged from the beach and mixed with their grain. This provides calcium, which makes thick, protective eggshells. Sometimes they get a maggoty or wormy vegetable or fruit. They relish compost—every ruined dinner or mouldy green discovered in the fridge is always greeted with the refrain “Happy chickens!”
A homegrown egg that’s fresh will sink if you put it in a bucket of cold water, a test we use when we’re suspicious of any eggs discovered in toolboxes or on a woodpile. Perfectly fresh, it will lie on its side on the bottom. Slightly older ones will stand on end. A dangerous one will float. Don’t crack that egg! Occasionally, we get forgetful or fooled by a broody hen clever at egg-hiding games. Every farmer is eventually caught off guard and cracks one of these skunky things on the frying pan’s rim; the egg will explode over the others and drive everyone retching from the kitchen, especially Sharon, who has such a keen sense of smell. When this happens I hurl the pan right out the door and onto the lawn, to hose down later. Despite the mythologies about the charms of rural life, cooking an egg can have its thrills.
That said, usually we don’t wash eggs for our own use. They are covered with a natural protective bloom. If you keep your nests clean with fresh hay and collect your eggs often, they won’t get soiled, and if they do, we prefer to wipe them with a dry cloth. Eggs for sale we are forced by the law to wash, improving their chances of spoilage, because washing destroys this protective coating. The factories heavily wash their eggs and then spray them with a mineral-oil seal, which causes enthusiasts like me to claim this makes them taste worse. Factories have to treat their eggs because they are so notoriously infected with salmonella and other dangerous bacteria that health agencies now warn everyone to assume cracked eggs are diseased.
Breakfast has become so dangerous that some American states have considered banning sunny-side-up eggs. I assume it won’t be long before the factory system, with its attendant troop of health Gestapo, bans the serving of any meal with raw eggs, including favourites like steak Diane and the original Caesar salad. I’ve never contracted salmonella from our birds—the chances are slim compared with the toxic possibilities of industrial eggs—and I don’t know anyone who has picked it up from free-range, traditionally slaughtered animals, though it certainly can happen. If the birds are treated well and intelligently they will give you beautiful eggs.
TAKE AN EGG AND crack it on a bowl. Out will slide one of the richest treasures of the animal world. Cooking an egg is an exacting business. In the film Big Night, after a traumatic all-night drama, a man brilliantly cooks up a pan of near-perfect scrambled eggs (apart from the mistake of not heating the frying pan first) for his ruined older brother, which they eat together, almost weeping, arms around each other. The cooking of those eggs was such a masterly production of scrambled-egg technique that I haven’t met a chef who’s seen the film who doesn’t go into orgasmic ecstasy at the mention of it. I spent almost a year imitating that actor’s egg-cooking technique.
We use a flat steel crepe pan for scrambled, and for sunny-side-up I use heavy cast-iron fry pans I salvaged in 1972 from a garbage dump on Texada Island, maybe a hundred miles north of us. I discovered a lifetime supply of these pans because everyone was throwing them away in favour of the toxic nonstick Teflon fryers that were the fad of the era. You can rescue a misused cast-iron frying pan by curing it in a bonfire. Then oil it up and season it in an oven. It comes out better than new. One of the joys of a cast-iron frying pan is its ability to be reborn again. A frying pan was almost all that a friend recovered from the charred remains of his house after a fire.
We forget what a treasure food is, especially the lowly breakfast, which has been so brutalized in North America. Like Sunday dinners, weekend breakfasts used to be an extended feast and gossip festival, a chance for the community of the family, and sometimes neighbours, to reunite and bond.
More than thirty years ago, when I lived in a ramshackle log cabin on Texada Island, I knew three brothers. They were big, hairy, farmy-biker-looking guys, yet tender and generous. It always seemed to work out that one would be away logging while the other two survived on unemployment insurance,
renovating their family farm until they got a new job. They were the most amicable trio of brothers I ever met, and they considered it important to gather together on Sunday for breakfast—an open house where islanders could show up for a chat, a meal, a beer, or coffee.
They’d start eating early and really be cooking by late morning. There’d be piles of homemade sausages, pancakes, waffles, eggs (scrambled or fried or hard-boiled), and bowls of porridge, cream of wheat, or oatmeal. All performed with minimal hassle. I’m sure they lived off the leftovers for the remainder of the week. One of them would wander into the kitchen and soon reappear with another heap of sausages or pancakes. I never understood how we could put all this food away, as well as the cases of beer. It would take too long to recount the down-home amiability of the conversation, which flowed from gardening to cabinetmaking . . . to fishing . . . to logging . . . to motorcycle repair . . . to relationships with women (who would often be present and wolfing down the pancakes). The brothers never got angry, even if the beer unexpectedly disappeared and desperate measures were needed to replenish the stock. As many as fifteen people would casually drop in. It was an endless feast, and everyone was welcome. Even lost tourists looking for directions would suddenly find themselves at table, plowing into the homemade sausages.
These rough, hairy lads served a local breakfast—the classiest I ever pulled up a chair to join. Thirty-five years later I’m suspicious that I’ve romanticized them, as memory tends to do, but the hope in me wants to believe in those boys of the morning who understood the meaning of breakfast in the country.
