If the smoosh-in has endured over the decades, it’s because there’s no quicker way to win an eater’s heart than by trumping expectation. And if Bruegger’s couldn’t take the hint being waved right in front of their faces and start mashing generous portions of salmon or chunks of olive into their cream cheese instead of allowing some tight-fisted comptroller at the factory to ration those things by the pinch, well, by God,I could. I left the store with a bag of hot bagels clutched to my breast and an even hotter desire burning inside it. I was heading straight for my first …
CHUNKY OLIVE-AND-ONION CREAM CHEESE MASH
[serves 1]
2 ounces cream cheese
3 or 4 imported black and/or green olives
1 teaspoon dried onion bits (see note)
generous dash hot pepper sauce
The night before, put the cream cheese on a cutting board. Pit the olives and tear into small bits. Work these, the dried onion bits, and the pepper sauce into the cream cheese with a butter knife. Form into a block, transfer to a plate, and cover with a small bowl. Refrigerate overnight, before spreading on a sliced warm bagel the next morning.
Variation.Chopped bits of dried tomato also soften nicely overnight in cream cheese and provide a fruity-tasting but still savory mash. Add a pinch of dried oregano and a grind of black pepper to this blend, plus—unless you have a dental appointment the next day—some minced garlic.
Cook’s Note.I fell in love with dried onion bits years and years ago, when I first met them pressed into the center of onion bialies made at an East Fourteenth Street bakery. In my innocence, I thought these delicious chewy little shreds, potent with onion flavor, were the result of some mysterious process known only to bialy makers. It would be decades before I discovered they were simply dried onion bits rehydrated in a little water. Their advantage lies in their resilient texture and convenience (and the fact that the hydrating process makes them more digestible than raw onion bits). The disadvantage is that their flavor has been reduced to a single onion-loud tone; they possess no finesse at all. (If you want the convenience without the vulgarity, substitute pricier but subtler freeze-dried shallots.) They can be found at most supermarkets; be warned, though, that if they’re only available in a little spice jar, you’ll be paying an obscenely inflated price. I buy mine in bulk and keep about half a cup in a plastic container in the refrigerator, moistened with a splash of Scotch whisky. They keep like this for weeks, ready to supply a pinch whenever I need one. As this book goes to press, a pound is only $6.40 (plus shipping) from the Spice House; 1031 Old World 3rd St.; Milwaukee, WI 53203; (414) 272-0977; www.thespicehouse.com.
Western Massachusetts has a strong Polish contingent, and there are several locally made Polish specialties at the supermarket, including some splendid kielbasa. What caught my eye during my breakfast browsings, though, was Millie’s pierogi, looking genuinely hand-shaped and prepared from good, simple ingredients, sitting freshly made in the dairy case.
Pierogi are very basic half-moon-shaped dumplings, not dissimilar to Chinese pot stickers, but pierogi dough is made with melted butter and egg instead of plain water, which means that the dumpling skin itself is far tastier. This is a good thing, since the fillings have none of the panache of the Asian variety—Millie’s, for instance, come in four rip-snorting flavors: farmer’s cheese, farmer’s cheese and potato, cabbage, and prune. (The dough’s utter simplicity means that pierogi are also laughably easy to make, but the process is time-consuming, especially since the usual recipe—based on one egg—is for four to fivedozen. )13
Also like Chinese dumplings, pierogi can be steamed or boiled, but nothing compares to cramming a bunch of them into a skillet and sautéing them lovingly in sizzling butter, with bits of onion and dried mushroom. On a good morning, they all puff up into plump little balloons and slowly turn an extremely appetizing tawny gold. I find that six of the plain farmer’s cheese sort make a good breakfast, brought straight to the table in the pan, which keeps them hot. At first, I took them with a dab of sour cream on the side, but lately I’ve been having them dressed in nothing but their cooking butter, seasoned as directed in the following recipe.
PANFRIED PIEROGI WITH BITS OF ONION AND DRIED MUSHROOM
[serves 1]
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 teaspoon dried onion bits (see page 81)
1 or 2 pieces of imported dried bolete (porcini), rinsed quickly in cold water and chopped into tiny bits
hot pepper sauce, salt, and freshly ground pepper to taste
8 cheese pierogi (if frozen, defrost on a plate in the refrigerator overnight)
sour cream (optional)
Melt the butter in a 10-inch nonstick skillet over medium heat. Sprinkle in the dried onion and mushroom bits, add a dash or two of hot pepper sauce, and season with a pinch of salt and a few grindings of pepper. Stir this gently with a spatula so that the seasonings are evenly distributed. Add the pierogi one by one and, as you do, dip one side quickly into the seasoned butter and then turn it over so that the unbuttered side goes facedown. After 5 minutes, start peeking at the undersides—turn them when their surface is anywhere from golden yellow to crusty brown around the edges, according to taste. When the other side is cooked to the same doneness, bring the skillet to the table and set it on a trivet. Sour cream is optional.
BIRD’S NEST
Although this was one of my favorite breakfasts when I was a little boy, I’ve rarely made it since, perhaps because you need a child’s innocence not to think it slightly silly. To make a bird’s nest, you tear a slice or two of buttered toast into pieces and put these in a small soup bowl or (as I remember it) a stoneware custard cup. This is the nest. Into that you spoon one or two soft-boiled eggs, add a pinch of salt and a grind of black pepper, and there you are. You eat it with a spoon; the soft white, the molten yolk, the buttery bits of toast, all get mixed up together without exactly melding, at least until they reach your mouth.
When I made it recently, I found it just as tasty as my memory of it—a lovely breakfast. But something isn’t quite right when you prepare it for yourself. A breakfast dish that forces you to wash your hands before you eat it—which you have to do after tearing up that buttery toast—just doesn’t cut the mustard. One possibility might be to cut the bread into cubes and fry these in butter to make croutons, which is not a bad idea. But before I had a chance to try it, another solution proposed itself.
Recently, the produce section of our supermarket has been offering a variety of already prepped and minimally precooked potato products imported from Canada—among them, small cubes for making pan fries and matchstick silvers for making hash browns. I’ve never been a big fan of hash browns, which too often turn out to be a slab of gluey-textured potato shreds encased in a crust. But if you panfry the same shreds loosely in butter until they get nicely (but not necessarily totally) browned, they make an absolutely transcendental bird’s nest.
The temptation here is to mold them into little nests in the skillet and fry the eggs right in them. This is easier, yes, but not better, since too much melding takes place in the pan. Do it this way instead:
BIRD’S NEST WITH MATCHSTICK POTATOES
[serves 1]
1 or 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
6 ounces ( bag) already prepped matchstick-cut potatoes (for whole potato, see note below)
2 eggs
Melt the butter in a small skillet and season it with salt and pepper to taste. Add the potatoes and, over medium heat, sauté until golden all over and edged with brown, about 10 minutes or so.
Have a small pot of gently boiling water waiting. When the potatoes are all but ready, lower the eggs into the water and cook for 3 minutes (or however long you like to cook a soft-boiled egg). Lift them out with a slotted spoon and briefly immerse them in cold water. Meanwhile, transfer the fried potatoes to a small bowl or large Pyrex custard cup and form them into a nest. Scoop the soft-boi
led eggs into this, season to taste with salt and pepper, and eat at once.
Cook’s Note.If prepped potatoes aren’t available, peel a medium-size all-purpose potato and coarsely shred it through the large cutting holes of a hand grater onto a clean dish towel. Wrap the towel around the shreds and squeeze firmly to extract as much moisture as possible, then transfer them to a skillet and proceed as directed above.
GOYA FROZEN TAMALES
Matt and I had made a quick family visit to the eastern part of Massachusetts to present her nephew with a computer game for which he’d been waiting a year and a half (or, as I pointed out to him, one-eighth of his life). Everyone then decided to make a celebratory lunch trip to our favorite barbecue joint, Blue Ribbon BBQ in West Newton, where we feasted on Kansas City burnt ends with assorted sides. Impulsively, on the way out, I ordered some cheese grits to go.
A few mornings later, back home in Northampton, I decanted the grits from their tub, cut them into thick slabs, and panfried them in hot butter. This, with some sausage links, was a truly fine breakfast, and the obvious thing to have done next would have been to dig out the address in Alabama for Adams Mill, order their speckled heart grits, and make up a batch myself.
I truly meant to do this, too—cheese grits is a dish you can make in your sleep, and a loaf pan full would provide many a happy breakfast. But … well … first I would have to wait for them to come from Alabama. Then I would have to make a batch, mix in the grated cheese and Tabasco sauce and garlic, and let it set overnight. Surely some prescient entrepreneur had already foreseen such cheese-grits yearnings and had some waiting in the frozen-food section of the supermarket?
No, they had not—not in these parts, anyway. However, anticipation whetted my interest in what I did find, a sort of cheese grits South-of-the-Border cousin—Goya brand frozen tamales. What connects cheese grits to tamales (and distinguishes them from both plain grits and polenta) is that each is enriched with fat: one with cheese and the other with lard and bits of cured pork. The tamales weren’t quite as tasty as the grits, but they were still very good, with the texture of a savory corn pudding and a clean if unemphatic corn taste. (They also come individually sealed in boilable plastic wrappers, which makes preparing them a snap.)
It probably helped that it’s been a long time since I’ve eaten a handmade tamale, so nothing lingered in memory with which to compare them. When Matt suggested I pull down Diana Kennedy to see what she had to say about them, I spontaneously blurted out, “Good Lord, I don’t wanther to know what I’m eating,” but really, in this instance it’s probably best to leave well enough alone.
In their native habitat, tamales are often formed around a filling and served lapped in chile sauce; in my breakfast world, they are eaten so:
TAMALES, ROASTED PEPPERS, AND CHEESE
[serves 1]
2 frozen tamales
2 slices of a mild white cheese like Monterey Jack
1 whole roasted red pepper (see note)
Heat the tamales as directed on the package. Meanwhile, slice the cheese. Split the roasted pepper into 2 halves and—if fresh from the fridge—warm them up a bit. (I put them on a saucer and slide this into our toaster oven, turned down to its lowest setting.) Slip the tamales from their packages directly onto a plate. Set a slice of cheese on each and top with a pepper half. Eat at once.
Cook’s Note.In the past several years, roasted red peppers have become much easier to find in supermarkets. Make sure the label actually says they are roasted (they also come pickled in brine). They are most likely to be found in the Italian foods aisle, but the ones I use—packed in a jar with huge garlic chunks—come from Bulgaria.
So, there you have it—my current breakfast lineup. On the one hand, you might exclaim: What variety! Pierogi, tamales, hash-brown egg nests, pungent olives mashed into cream cheese. But you might just as easily remark: How boring! A year of rooting around for the perfect breakfast and all you’ve accomplished has been to find a few fresh visages for the same old morning pal: something salty, soft, rich, and, almost always, crisp around the edges. (Once I perfect the panfried tamale, thealmost will be deleted from that description.)
That both of these insights are equally true tells us less about me, I think, than about what makes a meal a breakfast. The needs food fulfills when eaten directly after waking are too primal to allow much room for gastronomy, which quickly shifts the elegantly constructed engine of our appetite through every notch in the gearbox. First thing in the morning, however, we lock that shift lever in bottom gear, needing plain brute force to drag consciousness out of the primeval swamp and onto the rutted dirt road t hat leads to the business of the day.
I read a thriller before I go to sleep because it slips a leash around the free-floating anxiety bubbling in my brain and takes it for a run around the block, tiring it enough to allow sleep to come. I want that thriller to be sufficiently literate and inventive to draw me in, but not so much that it would interfere with its ability to play on those subliminal cords of fight or flee. In other words, I want to have my cake and eat it, too—the plot always different, the story always the same.
And so it is with breakfast. The mulish rigidity that governs what we want then signals something visceral at work that has no patience with such fripperies as true variety, let alone brunch menus or nutritional guidelines. On the other hand, once you start giving it free rein, there’s no saying what unholy places you may visit or in what strange company you may find yourself.
I don’t find this prospect disquieting. After all, if you think about it, you’ll see that, once again, breakfast form has been shaped by breakfast function, which these days is to gently shove this solitary writer—clinging tightly to his pierogior tamale-shaped life preserver—each morning out onto the dark and turbulent waters of his own imagination.
QUINTESSENTIAL TOAST
“Buttered toast!”said Mr. Jeffries. “I suppose we might manage that… .” His voice trailed away, leaving in its wake a note of doubt, perhaps even mild alarm. Indeed, he had taken on the appearance of someone reluctantly forced to the verge of a personal confidence.
“The thing is,” he began hesitantly, “Wilkins is such a dab hand at dry toast. He has the patience, you see. The stuff is crispness incarnate, and yet the surfaces are of the most delicate brown. It is like …,” he closed his eyes, “the tastiest breadcrumb you’ve ever nibbled, except …,” here a discreet but suggestive gesture, “of course, one is allowed an entirebite. ”
He opened his eyes and bent toward me in what was now a frankly conspiratorial manner. “To tell the complete truth, I worry that Wilkins might find makingbuttered toast rather demeaning,” he said. “Or worse, suspect a certain waning of confidence on our part in his toasting skills…. ”
“Dry toast it is,” said I.
— Nigel Strangeways,Toaster Agonistes (1923)
It’s early morning. We’re on the road for once, and we’ve just spent the night in a motel. Matt is in the shower; I’m fiddling with the television’s remote control, looking for The Weather Channel. To my exasperation, I find it just in time to miss the local forecast and have to sit through the entire cycle until it appears again. Someone details the weather situation in California; someone else prepares the international businessman for storms in Eastern Europe. A flood of commercials. I’m shaken from my drowsy state by one for Sunbeam toasters: something—but quintessential toast what?—is missing in this picture. Lots of people eating toast—no surprise there—but it’s alldry toast. No butter, no jam, no setting a ring of half-slices around a plate of ham and eggs.
Then, as all things do on television, the image fades. I absorb the local weather (cold, cloudy, chance of snow) and switch off the set, and we then head off together to the lounge, where a complimentary continental breakfast is being served. This, it turns out, surpasses our rather meager expectations: hot decent coffee, a choice of fresh fruit juices, a variety of bagels and breakfast pastries, and a very nice American
home-style loaf, hand-sliced, ready for toasting.
I pick out two pieces that are cut almost too thick to fit into the waiting toaster, pop them in, and start opening little butter packets. As I do, the television commercial comes back to mind. Sunbeam obviously thinks that for toast—and with it, of course, the toaster—to survive the Health Age, it must be pitched as a kind of heat crisped, handheld breakfast cereal. Plain toast: faster to make than instant oatmeal, and not one iota of worrisome fat or sugar. You don’t even have to sit down at the table to eat it—and no dishes to wash, just a few crumbs to brush off the kitchen counter at the end of the meal.
Back in the 1970s, I read an article inThe New York Times about the conditions in a particularly notorious welfare hotel. The reporter made passing reference to one of the tenants, who, with no money left for food, had been forced to feed her children on toast for an entire week. I can still feel the impact of this brief but graphic portrayal of desperate poverty and a mother’s love: there might be nothing but the cheapest kind of sandwich loaf to eat, but she would at least make it into toast. Hold this next to that Sunbeam commercial and you can’t help but feel something—whether irony or pathos I’m not quite sure—regarding the times in which we live.
However, there remained one final twist to this train of thought. Very recently, and unexpectedly—for reasons that had nothing to do with either poverty or fear of fat—I myself had become a devourer of dry toast. Here in this motel lounge, eating the buttered variety in the old familiar way, I realized that I had experienced a sea change similar to the one that happened when I first stopped drinking my coffee mixed with plenty of sugar and cream—hot-coffee ice cream, Matt’s father calls it—and began to take it black.
October 7th, 1794.We had for Breakfast, Chocolate, green & brown Tea, hot Rolls, dried Toast, Bread & Butter, Honey, Tongue and ham grated very small.
— The Reverend James Woodforde,Diary of a Country Parson
potonthefire Page 11