2010-01-03: An American breakfast in France

This morning we brought the trappings of an “American breakfast” up to Jim and Claudia’s — a Dutch/German couple who speak English to one another, and who have bought a condo in an old farm complex up on the Plateau de Valensole above Quinson. Claudia’s parents are visiting until Tuesday from Greater Frankfurt, and it was somewhat at the instigation of Claudia’s dad that this event transpired. (He’d mentioned in the course of our going with them for an impromptu drink at the local bar the other night that he and the missus loved, loved, loved American breakfasts, especially the breakfast buffets with all the bacon and eggs, etc. I/we offered to make them an American breakfast; however, given the fact that our tiny eat-in kitchen could not possibly accommodate seven adults, we prepared everything and took it up to J&C’s gracious and spacious place.)

Despite his fears that they would not turn out well and thus embarrass him, Mr Mo made pancakes and they were delicious as ever. We also brought with us our waffle maker and made Norwegian rice waffles, and I made scrambled eggs and bacon (cooking the bacon here at home ahead of time so as not to perfume J&C’s kitchen; as Claudia is vegetarian these days, I wasn’t sure if she’d find the bacon-waft offensive. Turns out she’s a recovered bacon-a-holic from her Boston days, during which she and her roommate apparently would eat entire packages of bacon — as in the family pack size — in one sitting.)

I had my bacon-with-breakfast for the 4th quarter of 2009 last week. I have now had my bacon-with-breakfast for the first quarter of 2010, though I suppose it’s possible that I’ll have some bacon and eggs at the quasi-American-style diner in Heidelberg this coming weekend. (Yes, I’m going back to Germany for about a week and a half, unless I wind up in Paris for the last part of my time away from home instead. When in Germany, I usually eat muesli in yogurt for breakfast on workdays — eating at my desk, since I leave for work at a time that is impossibly early to eat anything. Here at home, I often have cold cereal, but sometimes just a couple of pieces of toast and a fruit cup with my one daily cuppa joe — mostly without Bailey’s these days. Sigh. Mr Mo makes pancakes mostly on a weekly basis.)

I always have enjoyed an American breakfast. I was going to write that it is my favorite meal, but there are too many non-breakfast dishes that please my palate as much or (gasp) more than the breakfast spread. Growing up, my mom had a very regular schedule: we’d have some form of eggs on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; cold cereal on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays (except for the first Sunday of the month when we fasted as a religious observance), and then often something a bit more elaborate on Saturdays (pancakes from a mix being a frequent feature). 

A noteworthy breakfast “accomplishment,” if one can call it such, was the Ward Breakfast (on the Fourth of July); in particular the one at which I ate 65 (yes, sixty-five) little breakfast sausage links — and who knows how many scrambled eggs, but I lived for those links. We never, ever had them at home (my mom was strictly a Bacon Woman). My ability to eat in such astonishing piggish quantities has thankfully diminished with time.

Living in a land in which breakfast (for adults, at least) tends to consist of a cup of coffee and a measly tartine (toasted bread with butter or jam or spreading cheese) is a continuing source of disappointment, especially when paying for a “breakfast-included” hotel or guest room. I utterly refuse to pay 7+ euros for a most euphemistically-named “continental” breakfast (as mentioned, toast and coffee — and if one is lucky, maybe a yogurt or the possibility of a semi-stale bowl of cornflakes or “factory floor sweepings-style muesli”), but that’s what they often charge at hotels in France and some other benighted parts of Europe. I don’t mind paying for a more robust breakfast, such as one finds — or usually can find — in Germany, the UK, Spain, and so on.

One would think, given France’s overall gastronomic reputation, and the French Health Ministry’s apparently futile effort to promote breakfast, that some chef somewhere would figure out a way to get the French to pay more attention to the first meal of the day. The overall effect of the health ministry’s push has been the expansion of supermarket aisles laden with sugary-crap kiddie breakfast cereals. I do not blame French adults for (a) not eating the sugar-shit themselves and (b) caving into the marketing for their kiddies. 

As for me, bacon and eggs (scrambled, fried) notwithstanding, I think the traditional breakfast I most enjoyed during our travels was in Turkey: hard-boiled egg, tomato, cucumber, a kind of feta-like cheese, and bread. (And often some kind of muesli-esque cereal would be available as well.) For reasons that quite frankly escape me, I have not ever tried to adopt this and other healthier-seeming breakfasts into my daily routine. But maybe I should. And maybe I’ll give it a go when I get back from Germany in mid-January.

NORWEGIAN RICE WAFFLES

3 cups soft-cooked rice

1.25 cups flour

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 cup vegetable oil

3 eggs

1 cup milk

1 tsp ground cardamom (best to grind these up fresh from the whole seeds if possible; feel free to add more cardamom than the recipe calls for)

Prepare as per usual in a waffle iron. Serve with butter. (Fine, you can top it with apricot jam or powdered sugar or maple syrup or whatever if you must, but the cardamom-y flavor of these waffles is great with just butter.)