DESCRIBING BREAKFAST

From the kitchen came the sound of breakfast being prepared by a voracious one hundred pound scrawny behemoth (five feet four inches, and no banana for scale) at an early hour. Cantonese folks, as is well known, are keenly into food. What better way to wake up than to a feast? Dutch people are not quite so enthusiastic about eating at that hour (taking myself as the paradigm and perfect example of the type, you understand) and would far rather spend time early in the day contemplating the bleakness of existence, man's inhumanity to man, and whether there are any more tropical paradises to brutally exploit with our finely honed imperialist mechanisms.

Where can we establish sugar cane plantations?
Do they have any foods we can claim?
Ancient artifacts?

My apartment mate, a femal person of Cantonese ancestry born in San Francisco, has a commendable appetite at an ungodly hour of the day. Whereas I, descended from several generations of Anglo-Dutch Americans, and raised in the Netherlands between the ages of two and eighteen, have a much bleaker almost puritanical imperative at that hour.
A cup of strong coffee, then a pipe outside in the freezing cold.

Neither of us are British or Hobbits. So that half-witted approach toward the first sustenance of the day, furthering the cause of diabetes, acid reflux, and an increased incidence of both gout and arterial destruction, is not part of the programme. Which is why I suspect that her breakfast consisted of a toasted something with butter and jam, plus a cup of milky tea.

Mine was coffee with milk and sugar followed by forty minutes with a briar pipe and some delightful aged Virginia as the fog dissipated on the crest of Nob Hill, outside temperature around fifty degrees, with bleakness all around and distantly pet dogs pooing next to their owners standing at ready with plastic baggies.

Hector, with whom I work two or three days a month, tends toward either a Don Pepin or an Oliva Connecticut Reserve (Nicaraguan filler) as breakfast. He's from Central America, they do weird things there.

Years ago I would occasionally have the typical American breakfast plate late in the day. Hash browns, sausages, egg, steaming pile of rice, with lots of hotsauce, or fresh chilies, or salsa picante. Sometimes nowadays if I'm in Chinatown early enough a bowl of congee and a fried dough stick. Congee is almost never available at typical Anglo establishments or restaurants catering to the generic crowd. Sad.



Absolutely the perfect "second breakfast" is heading over to a teahouse for dimsum two or three hours after coffee and a smoke, for three to five lovely items and a pot of tea shared with friends. Which should, of course, be followed by a Dutch cigar or a pipe and a stroll.

The Ashton Half Corona would be splendid.
They are Dutch style, made in the EU.
Not too far from where I lived.
Very traditional.



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