The Results
Anyone trying to decide on the merits of bouillon cubes must first come to terms with their feelings about monosodium glutamate, because MSG is what makes a bouillon cube tick. Comparing canned chicken broth with chicken-flavored broth made from a bouillon cube, one immediately discovers that the bouillon-cube broth, while it may have some chicken flavor, tastes nothing at all like chicken broth. However, at the same time, it has more “flavor” than chicken broth—so much so that, in order to understand what I was tasting, I mixed a quarter-teaspoon of MSG into the cups of canned beef and chicken broth. These mixtures, in all but one instance, tasted like—but also tastedbetter than—the bouillon-cube broths.
Of course, salt and MSG were ingredients I was expecting to find. What I wasn’t prepared for was the high proportion of animal and vegetable fat. In several of the cubes it was the second ingredient listed, directly after salt. This fat gave the broth a more authentic-seeming “mouth feel” but universally left in its wake a greasy aftertaste.
The all-aroundworst -tasting cubes were those purporting to make beef bouillon. I tasted two: one from Knorr (caldo de res), made in Mexico, and the other from Maggi (bouillon de b uf), made in Switzerland. Both had a strong “bouillon-cube” flavor and a very greasy aftertaste, but the only hint of beefy flavor was the dominant tone of stale Bovril—along with, in the Maggi cube, dried parsley.
Only slightly better were Maggi’sbouquet de légumes and Knorr’sbrodo ai funghi (“speciale per risotti, sughi, umidi” ). Maggi’s mixed-vegetable broth had the taste of cooked yeast (it did, in fact, contain yeast extract) and left a tallowy coating on the tongue. The mushroom-flavored cube did have a perceptible taste of cèpes, but it was also too salty and the mushroom taste was unpleasantly coarse. I can imagine it—although I wouldn’twant it—as a flavor agent in a gravy (sugo) or a stew (umido), but it would be a disaster in a risotto.
A further step up were the chicken-flavored bouillon cubes, again one from Knorr (caldo de pollo), made in Mexico, and one from Maggi (bouillon de volaille), made in Switzerland. These had a distinct chicken taste, but their bouillon-cube taste was much stronger. The MSG–chicken broth mixture was superior to both.
The last batch I tasted proved to be far and away the most interesting: the Italian “broth” cubes. I tasted five of them:brodo “classico, ” made by Liebig, in Perugia;brodo di lusso sovrano (“supreme luxury”) andbrodo di gusto classico (“classic taste”), both made by Knorr; Brodo Star; and Brodo Maggi. The last four were all made in Milan.
Among these, two stood head and shoulders above the rest: Knorrbrodo di lusso sovrano and Brodo Maggi. However, the Knorr broth, while it had a notably good taste, was marred by the recognizable (and lingering) flavor of boiled bones. On the other hand, the best of the lot—Brodo Maggi—although greasy tasting, was not tallowy and did not, in fact, contain animal fats (the only brand that didn’t). It was also the only brand without a bouillon-cube taste. Instead, it had a rich, complex flavor that was quite good—better even than the canned broth—perhaps because it contained dried onion, carrot, celery, and leek. If I were bringing bouillon cubes back from Italy, Brodo Maggi are the ones I would stuff into my suitcase.
Still, I doubt that I’d ever bother to do so. Tasty as it is, the effect created by Brodo Maggi is accomplished not by some kind of magic but by massive infusions of MSG, salt, and vegetable fat. I suspect that the allure these cubes have for Italian cooks, who use them even to enhance real stock, reflects that old and hard-to-argue-with culinary maxim: more is more. However, those of us for whom the taste of a highly concentrated meat broth is not the be-all and end-all of good eating might do well to leave this kind of dice playing to those who understand the game.
THE BREAKFAST CHRONICLES
It’s been more than fifteen years since I last held down what many people disconcertingly refer to as a “real” job. Which is to say that for more than a decade I haven’t shaved before going to bed, taken my shirts to the laundry (“iron but no starch”), or put on a sports jacket before noon. I can no longer find the snooze button on my alarm clock while fast asleep. I’m not sure that I still know how to tie a necktie—or, for that matter, where exactly my neckties are.
What I can’t forget, however—what I continue to dream about regularly—is the trauma of the workday morning. It was such a mysterious thing—I went to bed wrapped in the quiet solitude of my personal life; I woke up to find my bed down the corridor from my office door. It was a long corridor, to be sure, and it took a lot of effort to drag myself down it—splashing my face with water, donning work clothes, and swilling coffee as I went.
I would have given anything at the time to make that hallway much, much shorter. I had to face cheek-nipping cold, subway cars so crammed with riders that I had to hammer myself in to escape being crushed by the closing doors, and the predictable but always mortifying late arrival, a good twenty minutes after everyone else. If only I could have woken up sitting in my office chair, scrubbed clean and fully dressed, to find that some considerate soul had left on my desk a jeroboam of steaming coffee and a cheese Danish the size of a pizza.
Instead, if I wanted such things, I had to make a quick detour to obtain them for myself. Although surely, most mornings, I must have eaten breakfast before I left home, I can’t for the life of me remember doing so or what I might have eaten if I did. (No time to cook. No appetite for dry cereals. Toast? Instant oatmeal? My mind is a blank.) All I remember is a world of pre-Starbucks coffee-and-pastry take-out joints and doughnut shops, with their half-evocative, half-repellent odor of boiled coffee and stale frying grease, filled with jostling patrons fighting for the counterperson’s attention.
I worked in downtown Boston for several years, and by the time I left I knew all the breakfast dives in the area and every item on their take-out lists, from almond croissants to Chinese crullers to the sausage rolls sold at an outlet of a British bakery chain trying to establish a beachhead on this side of the Atlantic. Then I left my job … and never entered one of those places again.
What surprises me on reflection is not the abruptness of this change but my total obliviousness to it. There was no sigh of relief heaved nor “good riddance” muttered. One day, there I was with my mouth full of cranberry-walnut muffin, and the day after, it was as if I had never known such things existed. From the moment the working world and I went our separate ways, I haven’t eaten a single jelly doughnut or raspberry turnover or anything else much resembling them.11
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by this. Of all our meals, breakfast is the one in which form most relentlessly follows function. The workday breakfast is eaten with one foot already out the door—which means that the outside has already plantedits foot right in our kitchen. In the television sitcoms of my youth, Dad ate standing up, a cup of coffee in one hand, his briefcase in the other. Now Mom is standing there with him, and the dirty cups sit in the sink until one or the other of them returns home at night.
The backlash hits once we arrive at the office, where a force as strong as gravity draws us toward the box of doughnut holes some well-intentioned soul has left beside the coffee machine. “Take three,” our inner quack prescribes, “one chocolate, one rolled in coconut, one dusted with multicolored sprinkles, wash them down with a hit or two of java … and you might just survive until noon.” By then, of course, we will know all too well how the day is—or, rather,isn’t —going. Our time.earlier resolve has been for naught: today has turned out to be no different from any other. The iron-willed may still lunch on salad and cottage cheese; the rest of us sink our teeth into an overstuffed pastrami sandwich, happy enough to have arrived at the top of the slope. From here, quitting time is downhill all the way.
The coffee break, the midmorning treat—these are nothing more than an all-too-ephemeral antidote to that white-collar malaise compounded of boredom, stress, fluorescent light, and recycled air. My interest in such treats vanished once I stopped perversely tryin
g to move my bedroom closer to my office and instead found a way to shift my office into intimate proximity to my bedroom. These days, rather than waking up to find—as I had once wished—that the painful transition from private to public self had already taken place, I open my eyes knowing it doesn’t have to happen at all.
Even so, I was still a long way from discovering a breakfast of my own. After I left my job, I moved to the coast of Maine, where Matt soon came to join me. For most of our time there, we lived off a dirt road in a house tucked into a pine woods. The deep silence that greeted us every morning all but mandated the house-livening presence of breakfast baking—pancakes, popovers, cranberry clafoutis, blueberry coffee cake. Indeed, such baking became so routine that Matt eventually had her biscuit making perfected to the point where she had them in the oven in five minutes flat and out of it before the coffee had finished dripping through the biggin.
I fed on the pleasure that Matt took from making these things, on the warmth of the hot range on a chilly winter’s morning, on the rich aromas that filled the kitchen as they baked. But as time passed, I began to discover that my pleasure faded about halfway through the actual meal. It’s hard to explain this experience—eating something good that is still somehow not the thing for you. Each bite is delicious, but deep inside you keep wanting the next spoon or forkful to arrive holding something else. When the murmur of city life replaced the quiet of the pine woods outside our windows, I was more than ready for a change.
At the same time, without the isolation pushing us together we became less dependent on each other’s constant company. Dormant personal rhythms began to reassert themselves. I hate to go to bed at night and hate to get out of it in the morning, but Matt is often up at dawn. Eventually, we surrendered to the obvious. Now, although we spend the rest of the day together, most mornings we breakfast by ourselves.
As it turned out, Matt had also begun to tire of all that morning baking. These days she prefers a very simple breakfast—hot buttered toast with honey, or sometimes Grape-Nuts and yogurt.12But my morning appetite, however lazy, is too restless to settle happily into so regular a gig. Initially, I thought otherwise. At first, my solitary breakfasts reflected a need to compensate for years of suffering from FEDS (fried-egg deprivation syndrome—Matt has never been much of an egg lover). But after several months, this everyday routine of fried or scrambled eggs began to pale. I needed some fresh inspiration.
Unfortunately, however, my breakfast instincts had atrophied, or perhaps I had never developed any to start with. True, I had always seemed to know what Ididn’t want—but while this ruled out whole aisles in the supermarket, it didn’t really bring me any closer to an answer. Here I was, at last able to have anything I desired for breakfast … exceptanything wasn’t what I wanted. I wantedsomething, and that something had a name I didn’t yet know.
The wordbreakfast seems to me not quite right for our first meal of the day. Whatever you want to call that stretch of time since supper, most of us don’t exactly think of it as a fast. We’re hungry when we wake up in the morning, no doubt about it. But we’re also groggy, vulnerable, feeling as though our brain is encased in nothing more solid than tissue paper. That mouthful we seek, blindly groping our way across the kitchen, bare feet padding on the cold linoleum, needs to be a very special sort of sustenance.
For the farmer who gets up at five to milk the cows, breakfast is not the hearty meal of flapjacks and sausage waiting for him when he gets back from the barn; it is the scrap of bread he grabs from the bread box as he passes through the kitchen, bucket and lantern in hand. And from that crust we can extrapolate what matters most for the rest of us when we sit down to the day’s first meal—minimum effort, maximum return. At breakfast time, we are all babies, yearning for our mother.
Admittedly, it can be a rather torturous road back to the metaphysical breast. For the truly innocent, a bowl of hot pap is all the occasion requires, whether that be porridge and milk, a doughnut dunked in coffee, or a bowl of steaming noodles steeped in beef broth. These days, though, most of us need some sort of psychic calmative as well, embodied in the jujube-esque megasupplement, the frothy protein drink, the vitamin-drenched, premasticated flakes of grain.
And what of the divide between the sweet and the savory breakfast lover? Is this a matter of body chemistry, or is it another way of handling primal discontent? Does the one keep adding sugar in hopes of returning to a half-remembered, now unattainable state of sweetness and bliss? Does the other keep salting and peppering to give savor to what has otherwise proven drearily bland?
Well, whatever the answer, we hardly want it to intrude on our breakfast. It’s enough to notice that the essence of the perfect morning meal, no matter how we season it, is the soothing feeling of imbibing energy without expending any. The golden rule of morning eating is simply this: breakfast isbefore work. If there has to be any cooking at all, we want it to be nothing more than an appetite-enhancing form of play.
This is only possible, of course, if someone else has done all the necessary prep. And until the advent of the processed-food industry, that person was usually a hen. The egg is the original prepackaged breakfast, a meal that—at least before salmonella worries—could be sucked right from the shell. (I had a college friend who breakfasted every morning on two fresh raw eggs, which he broke into a glass, seasoned with salt and pepper, whipped up with a fork, and drank straight down.) Otherwise, they can be cooked easily and quickly in any number of pleasant ways—poached, fried, scrambled, boiled, coddled, baked, even, if it comes to that, deep-fried.
The problem—at least for savory breakfast lovers like myself—is that after the egg comes … what? Cheese, to an extent. It is soft; it melts pleasingly when laid over a plate of home-fried potatoes—in fact, it would prove to be a crucial ingredient in many of my new breakfasts. But as the featured event, a slice of Gorgonzola or farmhouse Cheddar quickly begins to cloy. It turns out that the world abounds in ideas for one-shot epicurean breakfasts—the wedge of pâté, the smoked duck breast, the tureen of menudo, the brace of marrowbones. Far harder to find is the unremarkable but always welcome sort—the savory equivalent to a bowl of granola or a sticky bun.
Or so I feared when I first started pushing our grocery cart into some unfamiliar areas of the supermarket, searching for clues, toying with foods that otherwise would never have caught my eye—individual pork pies, frozen beef and bean burritos, Chinese ravioli, finnan haddie. At one point or another, I tried them all. I made lots of mistakes. But gradually the field narrowed, and I began to approximate my ideal morning meal.
BAGELS AND CREAM CHEESE
This as a breakfast subject might seem to require hardly a mention, let alone a page of prose, but bear with me. I first sampled real bagels during my youthful stint living on New York’s Lower East Side, so I learned early on that they are a lot more than a roll with a hole. The interior should be dense and chewy, the crust shiny, resilient, and tight—as if it had been shrink-wrapped around the crumb. Bagels—like croissants, another ideal breakfast item too often spoiled in the making—require communion between knowledgeable bakers and knowledgeable eaters; if that’s not there, all you’re getting, no matter what it looks like, is just another bun.
Northampton has a bagel bakery—part of a chain called Bruegger’s—where surprisingly decent bagels are boiled/baked all day long, and after a decade of bagel …wantage must be the word … you can get a feeling close to ecstasy hoofing it home through the snow with a sackful of warm bagels sheltered within your winter coat.
Bagels—warm, fresh bagels—exist to be split in half and spread with cream cheese, and it can stop right there. I love cream cheese; it has more attitude than butter, damned if it will melt in your mouth. And people who think of it as bland haven’t really bothered to let it sit in their mouths long enough to taste it. Good cream cheese is tangy, rich, and slightly sour, with a lingering clean dairy aftertaste. But, really, its role is to play the straight man of a two-ma
n team—the nice cop who sets you up for his partner’s punch, and then soothes you down so that the next one will also catch you off your guard.
On the sweet side, cream cheese makes preserves come alive—guava jelly, famously. But even old familiars like strawberry jam or grape jelly get a fresh charge in its company, since it has no trouble standing up to their cloying sweetness and bringing out the taste of the fruit. For me, however, where cream cheese best works its magic is on the intensely salty: smoked salmon, thin slices of prosciutto, dried salt beef.
One morning, as I was waiting my turn at Bruegger’s, I noticed that they were introducing a new green-olive-flavored cream cheese spread. This sounded tempting, but in appearance it proved to be not unlike their smoked salmon spread, except that where that was a solid mass of white speckled with tiny, pathetic orange wisps, this was a solid mass of white flecked with mingy bits of green.
As it happens, Northampton is home to the legendary Steve Herrell, inventor of the “smoosh-in.” I remember being taken to his original ice cream parlor in Somerville, Massachusetts, by the historian/writer Theodore Rosengarten, back in the early seventies, and watching with conflicting surges of incredulity and naked lust as the counterperson plopped scoop after scoop of Steve’s lusciously rich homemade ice cream onto a giant marble slab and muscled in whatever items the watching customer wanted: M&M’s or salted almonds, broken bits of Oreo cookies or Heath bars, big chunks of chocolate or peppermint candy.
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