“A good, honest, wholesome, hungry breakfast.”
--_The Compleat Angler._
“ONE fine morning in the full London season, Major Arthur Pendennis
came over from his lodgings, according to his custom, to breakfast at a
certain club in Pall Mall, of which he was a chief ornament.” This has
always seemed to me the noblest possible opening for a tale. The zest
of a fine morning in London, the deliberation of a gentleman taking his
ease in his club and fortifying himself against the day’s events with a
satisfying breakfast, are communicated to the reader in a manner that
at once inspires confidence and arouses the liveliest expectations. I
shall not go the length of saying that all novels should begin with
breakfast, but where the disclosures are to be of moment, and we are to
be urged upon adventures calculated to tax our emotions or our staying
powers, a breakfast table serves admirably as a point of departure. We
thus begin the imaginary day where the natural day begins, and we form
the acquaintance of the characters at an hour when human nature is most
satisfactorily and profitably studied.
It is only a superstition that night alone affords the proper
atmosphere for romance, and that the curtain must fall upon the first
scene with the dead face of the king’s messenger upturned to the moon
and the landlord bawling from an upper window to know what it’s all
about. Morning is the beginning of all things. Its hours breathe life
and hope. “Pistols and coffee!” The phrase whets the appetite both for
the encounter and the cheering cup. The duel, to be sure, is no longer
in favor, and it is not for me to lament its passing; but I mention it
as an affair of dewy mornings, indelibly associated with hours when the
hand is steady and courage runs high.
It may be said with all assurance that breakfast has fallen into sad
neglect, due to the haste and rush of modern life--the commuter’s
anxiety touching the 8.27, the city man’s fear that he may not be able
to absorb the day’s news before his car is at the door. Breakfast has
become a negligible item of the day’s schedule. An increasing number
of American citizens are unfit to be seen at the breakfast hour; and
a man, woman, or child who cannot present a cheery countenance at
breakfast is living an unhealthy life upon the brink of disaster. A
hasty visit to the table, the gulping of coffee, the vicious snapping
of teeth upon food scarcely looked at, and a wild rush to keep the
first appointment noted on the calendar, is the poorest possible
preparation for a day of honest work. The man who follows this practice
is a terror to his business associates. Reports that “the boss isn’t
feeling well this morning” pass about the office, with a disturbance of
the morale that does not make for the efficiency of the establishment.
The wife who reaches the table dishevelled and fretful, under
compulsion of her conscience, with the idea that the lord of the house
should not be permitted to fare forth without her benediction, would do
better to keep her bed. If the eggs are overdone or the coffee is cold
and flavorless, her panicky entrance at the last moment will not save
the situation. A growl from behind the screening newspaper is a poor
return for her wifely self-denial, but she deserves it. There is guilt
upon her soul; if she had not insisted on taking the Smiths to supper
after the theatre the night before, he would have got the amount of
sleep essential to his well-being and the curtaining paper would not be
camouflaging a face to which the good-by kiss at the front door is an
affront, not a caress.
“Have the children come down yet?” the lone breakfaster growlingly
demands. The maid replies indifferently that the children have
severally and separately partaken of their porridge and departed. Her
manner of imparting this information signifies rebellion against a
system which makes necessary the repeated offering of breakfast to
persons who accept only that they may complain of it. No happier is the
matutinal meal in humbler establishments where the wife prepares and
serves the food, and buttons up Susie’s clothes or sews a button on
Johnny’s jacket while the kettle boils. If the husband met a bootlegger
in the alley the previous night it is the wife’s disagreeable duty to
rouse him from his protracted slumbers; and if, when she has produced
him at the table, he is displeased with the menu, his resentment,
unchecked by those restraints presupposed of a higher culture, is
manifested in the playful distribution of the tableware in the general
direction of wife and offspring. The family cluster fearfully at the
door as the head of the house, with surly resignation, departs for
the scene of his daily servitude with the smoke of his pipe trailing
behind him, animated by no love for the human race but only by a firm
resolution not to lift his hand until the last echoes of the whistle
have died away.
It is foreign to my purpose to indict a whole profession, much less
the medical fraternity, which is so sadly harassed by a generation
of Americans who demand in pills and serums what its progenitors
found in the plough handle and the axe, and yet I cannot refrain from
laying at the doors of the doctors some burden of responsibility for
the destruction of the breakfast table. The astute and diplomatic
physician, perfectly aware that he is dealing with an outraged
stomach and that the internal discomfort is due to overindulgence, is
nevertheless anxious to impose the slightest tax upon the patient’s
self-denial. Breakfast, he reflects, is no great shakes anyhow, and he
suggests that it be curtailed, or prescribes creamless coffee or offers
some other hint equally banal. This is wholly satisfactory to Jones,
who says with a sigh of relief that he never cared much for breakfast,
and that he can very easily do without it.
About twenty-five years ago some one started a boom for the
breakfastless day as conducive to longevity. I know persons who have
clung stubbornly to this absurdity. The despicable habit contributes to
domestic unsociability and is, I am convinced by my own experiments,
detrimental to health. The chief business of the world is transacted
in the morning hours, and I am reluctant to believe that it is most
successfully done on empty stomachs. Fasting as a spiritual discipline
is, of course, quite another thing; but fasting by a tired business
man under medical compulsion can hardly be lifted to the plane of
things spiritual. To delete breakfast from the day’s programme is
sheer cowardice, a confession of invalidism which is well calculated
to reduce the powers of resistance. The man who begins the day with a
proscription that sets him apart from his neighbors may venture into
the open jauntily, persuading himself that his abstinence proves his
superior qualities; but in his heart, to say nothing of his stomach,
he knows that he has been guilty of a sneaking evasion. If he were
a normal, healthy being, he would not be skulking out of the house
breakfastless. Early rising, a prompt response to the breakfast-bell,
a joyous breaking of the night’s fast is a rite not to be despised in
civilized homes.
Old age rises early and calls for breakfast and the day’s news.
Grandfather is entitled to his breakfast at any hour he demands it. He
is at an age when every hour stolen from the night is fairly plucked
from oblivion, and to offer him breakfast in bed as more convenient
to the household, or with a well-meant intention of easing the day
for him, is merely to wound his feelings. There is something finely
appealing in the thought of a veteran campaigner in the army of life
who doesn’t wait for the bugle to sound reveille, but kindles his fire
and eats his ration before his young comrades are awake.
The failure of breakfast, its growing ill repute and disfavor are not,
however, wholly attributable to the imperfections of our social or
economic system. There is no more reason why the homes of the humble
should be illumined by a happy breakfast table than that the morning
scene in abodes of comfort and luxury should express cheer and a
confident faith in human destiny. Snobbishness must not enter into this
matter of breakfast reform; rich and poor alike must be persuaded that
the morning meal is deserving of all respect, that it is the first act
of the day’s drama, not to be performed in a slipshod fashion to spoil
the rest of the play. It is the first chapter of a story, and every one
who has dallied with the art of fiction knows that not merely the first
chapter but the first line must stir the reader’s imagination.
Morning has been much sung by the poets, some of them no doubt wooing
the lyre in bed. A bard to my taste, Benjamin S. Parker, an Indiana
pioneer and poet who had lived in a log cabin and was, I am persuaded,
an early and light-hearted breakfaster, wrote many verses on which the
dew sparkles:
“I had a dream of other days,--
In golden luxury waved the wheat;
In tangled greenness shook the maize;
The squirrels ran with nimble feet,
And in and out among the trees
The hangbird darted like a flame;
The catbird piped his melodies,
Purloining every warbler’s fame:
And then I heard triumphal song,
’Tis morning and the days are long.”
I hope not to imperil my case for the cheerful breakfast table by
asserting too much in support of it, but I shall not hesitate to
say that the contemptuous disregard in which breakfast is now held
by thousands of Americans is indisputably a cause of the low state
to which the family tie has fallen. It is a common complaint of
retrospective elderly persons that the family life, as our grandparents
knew it, has been destroyed by the haste and worry incident to modern
conditions. Breakfast--a leisurely, jolly affair as I would have
it, with every member of the household present on the stroke of the
gong--is unequalled as a unifying force. The plea that everybody is in
a hurry in the morning is no excuse; if there is any hour when haste is
unprofitable it is that first morning hour.
It is impossible to estimate at this writing the effect of the
daylight-saving movement upon breakfast and civilization. To add an
hour to the work-day is resented by sluggards who, hearing seven chime,
reflect that it is really only six, and that a little self-indulgence
is wholly pardonable. However, it is to be hoped that the change, where
accepted in good spirit, may bring many to a realization of the cheer
and inspiration to be derived from early rising.
A day should not be “jumped into,” but approached tranquilly and with
respect and enlivened by every element of joy that can be communicated
to it. At noon we are in the midst of conflict; at nightfall we have
won or lost battles; but in the morning “all is possible and all
unknown.” If we have slept like honest folk, and are not afraid of a
dash of cold water, we meet the day blithely and with high expectation.
If the day dawn brightly, there is good reason for sharing its promise
with those who live under the same roof; if it be dark and rain beats
upon the pane, even greater is the need of family communion, that every
member may be strengthened for valiant wrestling with the day’s tasks.
The disorder of the week-day breakfast in most households is
intensified on Sunday morning, when we are all prone to a very liberal
interpretation of the meaning of a day of rest. There was a time not
so long ago when a very large proportion of the American people rose
on Sunday morning with no other thought but to go to church. Children
went to Sunday-school, not infrequently convoyed by their parents. I
hold no brief for the stern inhibitions of the monstrous Puritan Sunday
which hung over childhood like a gray, smothering cloud. Every one has
flung a brick at Protestantism for its failures of reconstruction and
readjustment to modern needs, and I am not without my own shame in this
particular. The restoration of breakfast to its rightful place would
do much to put a household in a frame of mind for the contemplation of
the infinite. Here, at least, we are unembarrassed by the urgency of
the tasks of every day; here, for once in the week, at an hour that may
very properly be set forward, a well-managed family may meet at table
and infuse into the gathering the spirit of cheerful yesterdays and
confident to-morrows.
No better opportunity is afforded for a friendly exchange of
confidences, for the utterance of words of encouragement and hope and
cheer. Tommy, if he has been dealt with firmly in this particular on
earlier occasions, will not revive the old and bothersome question of
whether he shall or shall not go to Sunday-school. If he is a stranger
to that institution by reason of parental incompetence or apostasy,
the hour is not a suitable one for mama to make timid suggestions as
to the importance of biblical instruction. Nor will eighteen-year-old
Madeline renew her demand for a new party dress when this matter was
disposed of definitely Saturday night. Nor will the father, unless he
be of the stuff of which brutes are made, open a debate with his wife
as to whether he shall accompany her to church or go to the club for a
luxurious hour with the barber. A well-ordered household will not begin
the week by wrangling on a morning that should, of all mornings, be
consecrated to serenity and peace.
Great numbers of American households are dominated by that marvel
of the age, the Sunday newspaper. For this prodigious expression of
journalistic enterprise I have only the warmest admiration, but I
should certainly exclude it from the breakfast table as provocative
of discord and subversive of discipline. Amusing as the “funny page”
may be, its color scheme does not blend well either with soft-boiled
eggs or marmalade. Madeline’s appetite for news of the social world
may wait a little, and as there is no possibility of buying or selling
on the Sabbath-day, the gentleman at the head of the table may as
well curb his curiosity about the conclusions of the weekly market
review. Fragments of Sunday newspapers scattered about a breakfast
table are not decorative. They encourage bad manners and selfishness.
A newspaper is an impudent intrusion at the table at any time, but
on Sunday its presence is a crime. On an occasion, the late William
Graham Sumner was a guest in my house. Like the alert, clear-thinking
philosopher he was, he rose early and read the morning paper before
breakfast. He read it standing, and finding him erect by a window with
the journal spread wide for greater ease in scanning it quickly, I
begged him to be seated. “No,” he answered; “always read a newspaper
standing; you won’t waste time on it that way.”
With equal firmness I should exclude the morning mail from the table.
The arrival of the post is in itself an infringement upon domestic
privacy, and the reading of letters is deadly to that conversation
which alone can make the table tolerable at any meal. Good news can
wait; bad news is better delayed until the mind and body are primed
to deal with it. If the son has been “canned” at school, or if the
daughter has overstepped her allowance, or if some absent member of the
family is ill, nothing can be done about it at the breakfast table.
On the first day of the month, the dumping of bills on the table, to
the accompaniment of expostulations, regrets, and perhaps tears, should
be forbidden. Few homes are so controlled by affection and generous
impulses as to make possible the distribution of bills at a breakfast
table without poisoning the day. A tradesman with the slightest feeling
of delicacy will never mail a bill to be delivered on the morning of
the first day of the month. Anywhere from the third or fourth to the
twentieth, and so timed as to be delivered in the afternoon--such
would be my suggestion to the worthy merchant. The head of the house
knows, at dinner time, the worst that the day has for him; if fortune
has smiled, he is likely to be merciful; if fate has thrown the dice
against him, he will be humble. And besides, a discreet wife, receiving
an account that has hung over her head ever since she made that sad,
rash purchase, has, if the bill arrive in the afternoon post, a chance
to conceal the odious thing until such time as the domestic atmosphere
is clear and bright. Attempts to sneak the dressmaker’s bill under the
coffee-pot are fraught with peril; such concealments are unworthy of
American womanhood. Let the hour or half-hour at the breakfast table be
kept free of the taint of bargain and sale, a quiet vestibule of the
day, barred against importunate creditors.
As against the tendency, so destructive of good health and mental and
moral efficiency, to slight breakfast, the food manufacturers have set
themselves with praiseworthy determination to preserve and dignify the
meal. One has but to peruse the advertising pages of the periodicals
to learn of the many tempting preparations that are offered to grace
the breakfast table. The obtuse, inured to hasty snatches, nibbles,
and sips, are assisted to a proper appreciation of these preparations
by the most enchanting illustrations. The art of publicity has spent
itself lavishly to lure the world to an orderly and contemplative
breakfast with an infinite variety of cereals that have been subjected
to processes which make them a boon to mankind. When I hear of an
addition to the long list, I fly at once to the grocer to obtain one
of the crisp packages, and hurry home to deposit it with the cook
for early experiment. The adventurous sense is roused not only by the
seductive advertisement but by the neatness of the container, the ears
of corn or the wheat sheaf so vividly depicted on the wrapper, or the
contagious smile of a radiant child brandishing a spoon and demanding
more.
Only a slouchy and unimaginative housewife will repeat monotonously
a breakfast schedule. A wise rotation, a continual surprise in the
food offered, does much to brighten the table. The damnable iteration
of ham and eggs has cracked the pillars of many a happy home. There
should be no ground for cavil; the various items should not only be
well-chosen, but each dish should be fashioned as for a feast of high
ceremony. Gluttony is a grievous sin; breakfast, I repeat, should be a
spiritual repast. If fruit is all that the soul craves, well enough;
but let it be of paradisiacal perfection. If coffee and a roll satisfy
the stomach’s craving, let the one be clear and not so bitter as to
keep the imbiber’s heart protesting all day, and the other hot enough
to melt butter and of ethereal lightness. The egg is the most sinned
against of all foods. It would seem that no one could or would wantonly
ruin an egg, a thing so useful, so inoffensive; and yet the proper
cooking of an egg is one of the most difficult of all culinary arts.
Millions of eggs are ruined every year in American kitchens. Better
that the whole annual output should be cast into the sea than that one
egg should offend the eye and the palate of the expectant breakfaster.
It grieves me to be obliged to confess that in hotels and on
dining-cars, particularly west of Pittsburgh, many of my fellow
citizens are weak before the temptation of hot cakes, drenched
in syrup. I have visited homes where the griddle is an implement
frequently invoked through the winter months, and I have at times,
in my own house, met the buckwheat cake and the syrup jug and meekly
fallen before their combined assault; but the sight of a man eating hot
cakes on a flying train, after a night in a sleeper, fills me with a
sense of desolation. Verily it is not alone the drama that the tired
business man has brought to low estate!
Sausage and buckwheat cakes have never appealed to me as an inevitable
combination like ham and eggs. Beefsteak and onions at the breakfast
hour are only for those who expect to devote the remainder of the day
to crime or wood-chopping. The scent in itself is not the incense for
rosy-fingered morn; and steak at breakfast, particularly in these
times of perpendicular prices, speaks for vulgar display rather than
generosity.
The history of breakfast, the many forms that it has known, the
customs of various tribes and nations, assist little in any attempt to
re-establish the meal in public confidence. Plato may have done his
loftiest thinking on an empty stomach; I incline to the belief that
Sophocles was at all times a light breakfaster; Horace must regret
that he passed into the Elysian Fields without knowing the refreshing
qualities of a grapefruit. If my post-mortem terminal were less
problematical, I should like to carry him a grapefruit--a specimen
not chilled to death in cold storage--and divide it with him, perhaps
adding a splash of Falernian for memory’s sake. But the habits of the
good and great of olden times are not of the slightest importance
to us of twentieth-century America. Still, not to ignore wholly the
familiar literary associations suggested by my subject, Samuel Rogers
and his weakness for entertaining at breakfast shall have honorable
mention. Rogers’s breakfasts, one of his contemporaries hinted, were a
cunning test of the fitness of the guests to be promoted to the host’s
dinner table--a process I should have reversed, on the theory that the
qualifications for breakfast guests are far more exacting than those
for a dinner company. We have testimony that Rogers’s breakfasts,
informal and with every one at ease, were much more successful than his
dinners. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and Moore, Southey and Macaulay,
the Duke of Wellington and Lord John Russell were fellows to make a
lively breakfast table. At one of these functions Coleridge talked for
three hours on poetry, an occasion on which, we may assume, the variety
or quality of the food didn’t matter greatly.
Breakfast as a social medium has never flourished in America, chiefly
because of our lack of leisure. Where recognized at all it is thrown
into the middle of the day where it becomes an anomaly, an impudent
intrusion. A breakfast that is a luncheon is not a breakfast, but a
concession to the Philistines. Once, with considerable difficulty,
I persuaded a lady of my acquaintance to undertake to popularize
breakfast by asking a company, few and fit, for eight o’clock. The
first party was delightful, and the second, moved along to nine, was
equally successful. But the hostess was so pleased with her success
that she increased the number of guests to a dozen and then to fifteen,
and advanced the hour to noon, with the result that the felicity of the
earlier hours was lost. One must have a concrete programme to be of
service in these reforms, and I shall say quite fearlessly that a round
table set for six is the ideal arrangement.
A breakfast must be planned with greatest care. It should never be
resorted to as a means of paying social debts, but arranged with
the utmost independence. Where a wife is a desirable guest and the
husband is not, there is no reason why a plate should be wasted. On
the other hand, I should as rigidly exclude the wife who is socially
a non-conductor. The talk at a breakfast table must be spirited, and
it will not be otherwise if the company is well chosen. It’s an absurd
idea that candle-light is essential to sociability and that wit will
not sparkle in the early morning. Some of the best talk I ever listened
to has been at breakfast tables, where the guests conversed freely
under the inspiration of a mounting sun. Doctor Holmes clearly believed
the breakfast hour appropriate for the disclosure of the sprightliest
philosophy.
An American novelist once explained that he did his writing in the
afternoon because he couldn’t make love in the morning. Not make love
in the morning! The thought is barbarous. Morning is of sentiment
all compact. Morning to the lover who possesses a soul is washed
with Olympian dews. The world is all before him where to choose and
his heart is his only guide. Love is not love that fears the morning
light.... There was a house by the sea, whence a girl used to dart
forth every morning for a run over the rocks. We used to watch her
from our windows, admiring the lightness of her step, her unconscious
grace as she was silhouetted on some high point of the shore against
the blue of sea and sky. It was to think of him, her lover, in the free
sanctuary of the new, clean day that she ran that morning race with
her own spirits. And he, perhaps knowing that she was thus preparing
herself for their first meeting, would fly after her, and they would
come running back, hand in hand, and appear with glowing cheeks and
shining eyes at the breakfast table, to communicate to the rest of us
the joy of youth.
There are houses in which participation in the family breakfast is
frankly denied to the guest, who is informed that by pressing a button
in his room coffee will appear at any hour that pleases his fancy.
Let us consider this a little. The ideal guest is rare; the number of
persons one really enjoys having about, free to penetrate the domestic
arcana, is small indeed. This I say who am not an inhospitable soul.
That a master and mistress should keep the morning free is, however, no
sign of unfriendliness; the shoving of breakfast into a room does not
argue necessarily for churlishness, and I have never so interpreted
it. A hostess has her own affairs to look after, and the despatch of
trays up-stairs enables her to guard her morning from invasion. Still,
in a country house, a guest is entitled to a fair shot at the morning.
The day is happier when the household assembles at a fixed hour not to
be trifled with by a lazy and inconsiderate guest.
Moreover, we are entitled to know what our fellows look like in the
morning hours. I have spoken of lovers, and there is no sterner test of
the affections than a breakfast-table inspection. Is a yawn unbecoming?
We have a right to know with what manner of yawn we are to spend our
lives. Is it painful to listen to the crunching of toast in the mouth
of the adored? Is the wit laggard in the morning hours when it should
be at its nimblest? These are grave matters not lightly to be brushed
aside. At breakfast the blemish in the damask cheek publishes itself
shamelessly; an evil temper that is subdued by candle-light will betray
itself over the morning coffee. At breakfast we are what we are,
and not what we may make ourselves for good or ill before the stars
twinkle.
I protest against breakfast in bed as not only unsocial but unbecoming
in the children of democracy. I have never succumbed to this temptation
without experiencing a feeling of humiliation and cowardice. A proper
punishment for such self-indulgence is inflicted by the stray crumbs
that lodge between the sheets unless one be highly skilled in the
handling of breakfast trays. Crumbs in bed! Procrustes missed a chance
here. The presence of emptied dishes in a bedroom is disheartening in
itself; the sight of them brings to a sensitive soul a conviction of
incompetence and defeat. You cannot evade their significance; they are
the wreck of a battle lost before you have buckled on your armor or
fired an arrow at the foe. My experiments have been chiefly in hotels,
where I have shrunk from appearing in a vast hall built for banqueting
and wholly unsuitable for breakfasting; but better suffer this gloomy
isolating experience than huddle between covers and balance a tray on
stubborn knees that rebel at the indignity.
The club breakfast is an infamous device designed to relieve the
mind of what should be the pleasant privilege of selection. I am
uninformed as to who invented this iniquity of numbered alternatives,
but I unhesitatingly pronounce him an enemy of mankind. Already too
many forces are operating to beat down the imagination. I charge this
monstrosity upon the propagandists of realism; certainly no romanticist
in the full possession of his powers would tolerate a thing so deadly
to the play of fancy. I want neither the No. 7 nor the No. 9 prescribed
on the card; and the waiter’s index finger wabbling down the margin
in an attempt to assist me is an affront, an impudence. Breakfast
should be an affair between man and his own soul; a business for the
initiative, not the referendum.
Breakfast out of doors is the ideal arrangement, or in winter under
an ample screen of glass. My own taste is for a perspective of sea
or lake; but a lusty young river at the elbow is not to be despised.
The camper, of course, has always the best of it; a breakfast of
fresh-caught trout with an Indian for company serves to quicken such
vestiges of the primitive as remain in us. But we do not, if we are
wise, wait for ideal conditions. It is a part of the great game of
life to make the best of what we have, particularly in a day that finds
the world spinning madly “down the ringing grooves of change.”
The breakfast table must be made a safe place for humanity, an
inspirational centre of democracy. A land whose people drowsily turn
over for another nap at eight o’clock, or languidly ring for coffee at
eleven, is doomed to destruction. Of such laziness is unpreparedness
born--the vanguard of the enemy already howling at the postern; treason
rampant in the citadel; wailing in the court. Breakfast, a sensible
meal at a seasonable hour; sausage or beefsteak if you are capable of
such atrocities; or only a juicy orange if your appetite be dainty; but
breakfast, a cheerful breakfast with family or friends, no matter how
great the day’s pressure. This, partaken of in a mood of kindliness and
tolerance toward all the world, is a definite accomplishment. By so
much we are victors, and whether the gulfs wash us down or we sight the
happy isles we have set sail with flags flying and to the stirring roll
of drums.