Good breakfast to you!

Tuis Mayıs 08, 2022

Some mornings are just plain old tough, aren't they?

I've had them, you've had them, even Ruth Reichl, editor of Gourmet magazine for ten years, has had them.

She was in Seattle promoting a new cookbook when called to immediately return to NY, no reason given. There she found out, along with her staff, that Gourmet was finished--

on her watch.

That upset me to no end when I heard it, I who had read the magazine for decades, but it devastated Ruth.

"And so I did what I always do when I'm confused,

lonely, or frightened:

I disappeared into the kitchen."

I won't go into the long story here but last Friday evening at about 5:15 p.m. our beautiful darling Mason got out a gate left open and disappeared.

About 19 terrible hours later we found him, soaked to the skin, a muddy mess, scared to death, but alive and well.

I don't remember what RH and I had for breakfast on Saturday morning while Mason was lost, something grabbed before heading back out to comb the neighborhood again and then home to make waterproof posters for the street.

But Sunday morning dawned full of sunshine and rejoicings

because our Mason was home with us again.

After feeding Mason and Bree their special breakfast of chicken livers and broth--they had both had dental surgery the Monday before and were on soft foods--we thought about our own breakfast.

And we craved comforting oatmeal. Ruth Reichl's Butter Toasted Apricot Oatmeal. We didn't have any apricots but golden raisins were fine instead.

"Butter-toasted oatmeal,

rivers of thick cream,

brown sugar.

Fresh orange juice;

Such fragrant hope."

On this first day of March, I'm thinking of a dear New Englander friend who has recently moved to North Carolina and been shocked to find pork chops, of all things, on the breakfast menus of restaurants in her new hometown.

Here's a little breakfast menu I found that early New Englanders would have eaten, girlfriend, by another New Englander:

"On these icy mornings we like a good breakfast.

I think with nostalgia of the early Americans

who lived in this house.

I know what they had; they had pie!

Good, robust, flaky, rich, spicy apple pie.

Aside from this they ate only

ham, eggs, pickles, cheese, sausage,

pancakes and sirup and,

for Sunday, codfish balls."

Gladys Taber

The Book of Stillmeadow