Preface

Good Morning

The clerk at the salvage store said the table was originally a workbench. It was a foot and a half wide. The tabletop was a thick, two-inch oak board, cracked and dotted with drill holes from decades of carpentry projects. That’s character, said the clerk. I tried to imagine myself sitting at this table, facing my husband, Stephen. We’d be the definition of face-to-face. Anyone not a fan of mealtime intimacy would be out of luck. But I noted how the table had curving iron legs and feet that splayed out like the paws of a plump Labrador. We lived downtown and our kitchen was narrow, so we needed an equally narrow table that could handle double duty as a prep surface. It was perfect.

Our new-but-old kitchen table is where we now unpack our groceries and chop vegetables. It’s where we place boards of cheese, olives, and nuts when people come over and where, once a year, we end up organizing papers into piles when we do our taxes. It’s our home base. If someone left their phone somewhere, or their keys, or their to-do list, that’s where we look first. It’s also, most importantly, our breakfast table.

Now that our son, Sam, is in elementary school and always interrupting us with new interests and quirks, every morning promises a new surprise too. The table’s narrowness is a plus: we touch knees while we dig into our oatmeal or eggs. It’s where we hash out the day’s agenda. It’s where we watch the sparrows and squirrels outside the kitchen window while they battle over seeds. It’s where Sam hums along to the morning radio shows and I wait for the weather report. It’s where everything starts.

A few years ago, around the time Sam graduated from mush to solids, I got into the habit of preparing big breakfasts every Sunday. We almost never had anything else scheduled on a Sunday. The pressure was off and we had all the time we wanted to goof around in the kitchen. Our ideal menu always included something savoury, something salty, something toasted, and something sweet. Some people like a simple breakfast—just toast or just porridge—but there’s a lot to be said for what’s called a well-rounded breakfast. Maybe porridge or cream of wheat to start, then eggs and bacon or sausage (or both), plus some fruit and toast. There should be good coffee and, in our household, a choice of fresh juice (since we each have our preferred kind, and Sam likes to mix them all together—what he calls his “rainbow juice”). For a finale, glazed danishes or maybe a croissant studded with toasted almonds. A still-warm, cakey doughnut won’t last long.

My mom taught me how to cook when I was a teen, mostly by letting me figure it out for myself. Breakfast was my specialty. I worked my way through the Joy of Cooking (blintzes, Dutch babies, hushpuppies), then our collection of Silver Palate cookbooks (so many quiches!), then James Beard (puffed eggs, baked eggs with tomatoes, farmer’s sausage), plus the buttermilk pancakes and cheddar biscuits in our free supermarket calendars. The hardest recipes to master were the most basic-seeming egg dishes—the perfect creamy omelette, the precisely timed poach, a custard-like scramble. Now that I’m a parent, I’m revisiting all those recipes for Sam, who has become an expert spotter of a pancake that’s ready to be flipped—and delivered to his plate.

Breakfast is better together. Science says so. Researchers have proven that families who sit down for breakfast have better physical and mental health. Kids do better at school. And everyone lives longer. One Australian meta-analysis of health studies showed that people who skip breakfast experience an 87 percent increase in risk for death from cardiovascular disease—and a 19 percent increase in risk for all causes of death.

The sociologist Jean-Claude Kaufmann, trying to explain how and why we invest so much meaning in our cooking, noted how the family table was originally a sacrificial altar that evolved, as recently as the 17th century, into a place where we gather daily. Like all sociologists, he writes about his subjects like he’s observing aliens, noting how “the data from [his] survey allowed [him] to confirm there is a very close relationship between families and meals.” Who would dispute that?

Lunch is all about efficiency. Dinner is usually the most labour-intensive and expensive meal of the day. But it’s breakfast that’s the most intimate and personal. We eat breakfast in our pyjamas, sometimes still hazy with dreaming. You know someone loves you when they make you a big breakfast. It works the other way too: making a big breakfast for someone you love tastes just as good, if not best of all.