I like breakfast so well; I might start eating it for supper
It had been a cold, dark morning, even for early November.
The wind had a terrible bite as the sun struggled to climb up from behind a rock-rimmed ridge in Southern McDowell County. In a little frame house on West Virginia Avenue in Iaeger, adjacent to meandering Tug River, a light was on in the kitchen that suggested that some of our kinfolk might be cooking breakfast.
When my grandfather and I stepped inside, a blast of heat greeted us from the reaches of an old wood-burning stove that gleamed with a red glow around thebottom end of stovepipe.
Everyone was dressed in cold-weather attire and high-topped shoe leather. Others wore heavy, fleece-lined vests over thick cotton overshirts.
Uncle Jesse was seated at the head of the table eating a steaming stack of mouth-watering flapjacks andscrambled eggs, sausage and gravy, chunks of fried apples and scratch biscuits made with lard.
Some of grandmother’s biscuits gathered right out of her piping-hot oven were dripping with molasses and some were clamped around thick chunks of fried fatback.
I noted that Uncle Claster was also crumbling biscuits in his blazing black coffee and drinking it thick from a monstrous, wide-rimmed mug with an oatmeal logo on it.
It looked and smelled powerful good to a 13-year-old boy with two hollow legs that hadn’t perceivedanything palatable since midnight, and it didn’t take much prodding for me to pull up a chair.
I can’t even recall whether anyone else went squirrel hunting with us that morning or not. But I haven’t forgotten my Grandmother Rosa’s early morning table-fare.
Odd as it may sound, that was not a particularlyunusual country breakfast back then—not substantially different from countless others I have eaten in the homes of relatives across a rural swathe of Southern West Virginia.
And you can throw in similar pre-dawn, jump-start engorgements with hunting and fishing companions all over the region.
Pardon me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me we are in danger of misplacing breakfast—at least the kind that features animal fat, cholesterol, calories, and caffeine.
Some of us don’t even partake of breakfast at allanymore, and the rest are more likely nowadays to nibble a bit of fruit and toast a bagel or slop down a half-cup of skim milk over some dried twigs and wheat chaff.
That might be good for the heart but it doesn’t speak to the soul.
It wasn’t always this way. Not so many years ago, the kitchen was the heart of the house—especially rural or country farmhouse.
For one thing, at 4 o’clock in the morning, when the roosters first crowed during the dark and cloudy winter months, it was likely to be the only room in the housewith any heat in it.
Indeed, the front rooms in most country houses, with their shadowy–black or wine-red horsehair sofas, were open to funerals and weddings (old coalminers and farmers never die, they just close up the rest of the house and live beside the cookstove).
And when you live in a kitchen and rise before daylight, breakfast probably isn’t a Pop Tart.
And though it may be premature to mourn the passing of the country-style breakfast but just in case, let’s light a candle and hold a brief vigil in its wake.
And, yes, I’ll wait while you get your bib.
The first item likely to be on any plate is a scratch biscuit made of flour, lard, and sweet milk or buttermilk. I suppose this has always been the essential centerpiece, but let me recommend a variation.
It has been many years since I had one of grandmother’s clabber biscuits. She milked the family cow and kept the unhomogenized milk in the refrigerator until it soured, then used this clabber to make sourdough.
The biscuits were big and fluffy, just the thing to spread with molasses, homemade jelly, jam, preserves or butter (never margarine).
If it was girth you were after, you’d stuff the clabber biscuit with a slab of country ham, fried fatback, pork-sausage, bacon, or country-fried steak.
And if you really wanted to test your Galuses, you’d assemble a pile of biscuits on a large platter and smother it in redeye or sausage gravy.
Another bit of breakfast magic rarely encountered today is the crackling biscuit (small bits of fried pork fat that are added to the dough).
I would not say that I would kill for a crackling biscuit, but I might maim the initial rogue competitor’s arm for reaching for one.
Of course, there were fresh eggs when the hens were laying, but eggs were fried hard on the sunny-side up—seldom were they scrambled and almost never poached.
I remember that my grandmother Rosa would discard the whites from soft-fried eggs until she had a pile of yolks. Then she’d scramble bacon and toast crumbs over them, mash everything into a paste, and weyoungsters would eat it with a fork.
Needless to say, Grandmother Rosa, understandably, was happy in her work, and her soul was well fed.
Nutritionists, meanwhile, have always told us that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but they now say we shouldn’t eat this kind of early morning gastronomy. So, where does that leave us?
I don’t know about you, but I’m going to resurrect a tradition from my childhood. I’m gonna start eating breakfast for supper.
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Top o’ the morning!