Our eight-year-old granddaughter spent the night with us not long ago, and her breakfast request made me realize that I’m in the same kind of rut my dad and granddad stayed in for years.
I have two biscuits and an egg every morning no matter how monotonous that becomes. It’s just easy to cook a week’s worth of biscuits, warm a couple up every day and scramble an egg.
Allie likes more variety at breakfast and changes her meals around with things like pancakes, sausage, grits, toast, cereal and oatmeal. On her recent visit, she wanted a boiled egg and a donut.
Boiled eggs were not a breakfast food in my younger years. If you had eggs for breakfast, they had to be fried, scrambled or maybe in an omelet with ham.
My mother used boiled eggs to make deviled eggs and egg salad with mayonnaise, mustard and pickles. Egg salad sandwiches were good, but we didn’t have those or deviled eggs for breakfast.
I think the strange phenomenon of boiled eggs showing up for breakfast started with these hotels that provide a free morning buffet for their customers.
That’s where I first noticed it anyway. Guys who looked like traveling salesmen would have those waffles you cook yourself and some fruit loops and then put several boiled eggs in their pockets.
I don’t remember ever seeing anybody actually eat those boiled eggs for breakfast. They either had them for lunch later in the day or took them home and saved them for Easter.
The morning Allie asked for a boiled egg, I put some on to cook and took her to a donut shop that just opened a while back. Allie had never been there, and she announced to all those drowsy people in the place at 6 a.m. that the donuts smelled great.
They gave her a donut hole as a sample, and she said it was the best donut she had ever eaten. Other new customers started changing their orders from one or two donuts to a dozen.
A lady at the counter offered to put me a free donut in Allie’s bag in appreciation for her rave reviews. But I never eat donuts or chocolate covered cherries because I can’t stop if I ever start.
While Allie was having her donut, boiled egg and chocolate milk, I thought about the summer I spent with my grandparents. My granddad had a ham steak, redeye gravy, two of my grandmother’s cat head biscuits and cream of wheat every morning.
She said he never had anything different for breakfast in all the years they had been married and declared in an understatement that he was “in a rut.”
He would split the biscuits and cover them with the red eye gravy my grandmother made in her iron skillet with ham drippings and strong, black A&P coffee. It was the same skillet she used for her biscuits.
I could understand how the biscuits, ham and gravy got him in the breakfast rut but not the cream of wheat. I had my first and last taste of that awful stuff that summer at my grandparents’ house.
Cream of wheat is not like grits. It must be a yankee invention. I wonder if Grits Gresham, the famous outdoorsman and writer who lived here, would have been nicknamed Cream of Wheat Gresham instead of Grits if he had lived somewhere up north like New Jersey.
My mother fixed my dad three strips of crisp bacon, two fried eggs that he covered with black pepper and two pieces of buttered toast every single day. She cooked the eggs in the bacon grease that she saved and kept on the stove to season cornbread and other things.
One of my mother’s sisters married a New York guy who was stationed at an Air Force base in Louisiana. The first time he visited, he asked for a bagel for breakfast. My mother said she didn’t know any place that sold bagels, and I had never heard of them.
She served him buttered toast with mayhaw jelly. Every time he came here from New York after that, he asked for “some of that fried bread” with the “mayhall” jelly.
I want to climb out of the rut I have been in at breakfast before I get too much more like my dad and granddad. I’m thinking boiled eggs and donuts tomorrow but not cream of wheat.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES