I have been traveling a bit, able at my advanced age to do that, eating a lot of breakfasts in hotels and also on a ship.  And wherever I go, I have been offered copious breakfasts with a range of choices.  I am reminded all the time that we Americans are not at all brave with our breakfasts. 

When I was a boy in Baltimore, we ate breakfasts as a family.  Although we arrived in the breakfast room at different times, we sat together, coming and going, telling each other about our plans for the day, making little commitments, sometimes placidly, sometimes with irritation.  

After the age of 14, I cooked my own breakfasts; my mother was busy with my four-year-old twin sisters.  My choices were generally eggs, usually fried, sometimes boiled or shirred, with bacon or and/or sausage. I’d also have toast made with white bread delivered by our Sealtest milkman, fake rye bread that my father liked, or Thomas English muffins, topped with butter or cheese, never jam.

A bit later, when my sisters were approaching teendom, they ate open-faced toasted cheese sandwiches for breakfast.  They were known in our family as “rubber ready sandwiches.”  My mother put them in the oven while my sisters dressed, and they cooked and cooked until the cheese became dehydrated, turned into rubber as they waited for my sisters’ arrival.

My father liked knaeckebrot with herring and anchovies and a very smelly cheese.  He was Swedish.  I loved Smithfield ham spread on toast, and still buy and import that to Washington in little jars of the spread from Eddie’s Supermarket in Baltimore. 

All of us ate salty foods, and didn’t care much for sweet.  

No one in my family favored what was then, in the 1950s, becoming more and more popular as breakfast – cereal with bananas, sugar and milk.  When I say “cereal,” I mean only Wheaties, Corn Flakes, Grape Nuts, and Shredded Wheat.  Those were the breakfast cereals of our childhood, the ones that sponsored Jack Armstrong, The Lone Ranger and others of the radio programs we listened to before dinner in the Forties.

Everybody used to say – and still say that “breakfast is the most important meal of the day” (a slogan invented by John Harvey Kellogg).  Perhaps that was so in the 19^th Century when farm families gathered at the table after their morning chores.  

But not since then. 

Now we gather briefly if at all in our homes to eat as quickly as we can cereal poured from boxes, eggs, pancakes, pop tarts and frozen waffles heated in the toaster.                

 But these couldn’t differ more than the breakfasts I ate in Georgia (the country), in Barcelona and Istanbul – and certainly not in the amazingly abundant Turkish Air Lounge in the Istanbul airport.  There were many tables and booths there, the tables holding dishes of fresh and dried fruits, the booths preparing stuffed and topped breads to order with fillings of cheese and meats and vegetables, large platters with local cheeses and fresh fruits.  

On the cruise from Barcelona across the Atlantic we were also offered breakfasts like that.  A cavernous dining room was ringed by counters where bakers offered very good breads and pastries, where salamis, cheeses, anchovies, and herring were put on our plates.  At other counters were freshly cut fruits and melons; at others were eggs prepared with hollandaise, tomatoes, ham and bacon.  There were baked beans, congee, sauteed greens, waffles, pancakes, coffee cakes.

These were wonderful breakfasts that I enjoyed too much, and as I was on a cruise with very little to do, I could enjoy my coffee, my fruit, my book, and my views of the ocean without having to worry about what came next in my day, what appointments I had, and what children I had to drive to school.  

So instead I thought about normal run-of-the day breakfasts and how we might improve what we ate at them.

Most breakfast eaters are not risk-takers.  Most breakfast eaters eat the same foods every day.  Coffee, tea, cereal, a pastry, toast.  They don’t want to be bothered with anything else to think about as they begin their days.  It takes a bit of effort to think as you are showering and shaving, “What do I want to eat for breakfast?  Do I have time to prepare that?”

I was a witness to that effort a long time ago when I was in Marrakech, staying at the Mamounia, the most glamours hotel of my life.  

I got myself invited to go early in the morning to the home of someone who worked at the hotel.  He ushered me through the streets of Marrakesh to his modest home to sit as his wife mixed flour, water, yeast, and salt that she kneaded into a flatbread.  She broke off pieces and with her hands flattened them, and then fried them in a hot, greaseless frying pan – then served them to her two children with cheese melting on them.  Then her husband and I walked the tray of flatbreads covered with a cloth to the neighborhood bakery, leaving them to be baked and made ready for him to pick them up in the early afternoon so that the family could eat at lunch and later at dinner. 

 We Americans have no time for such things – no time to make bread, cook breakfast, eat breakfast, or  talk with each other over breakfast. 

 When my sons were teenagers and we lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, I would get up each morning to prepare breakfasts for them.  They didn’t like it.  They didn’t want to eat breakfast, and they certainly didn’t want to sit at the table with me or each other to eat breakfast.  

I invented portable breakfasts for them – sandwiches, popovers, and other bread-based foods, unable to argue that they had no time to eat breakfast.  I could not persuade them that they did have time and should sit at the table and be social with me – and with each other.  

Teenaged boys?  Social in the morning?  Social anytime?

My trip made me think once again about the range of foods one can eat for breakfast – fruits, cereals, fish, cheese, and meat proteins, even soups and vegetables.  For those not going off to school, those foods can be eaten early or late in the morning.  They can be limited in scope for people who like repetition as many people do.

I know that everyone feels limited in time these days and few people want to prepare and consume breakfasts. But I also remember my own boyhood when family breakfasts were a very good way to start a day.