Power Breakfast? I'll give you a power breakfast*

The Financial Times tells us that the power breakfast is on its way back, though participation has been slimmed down from the teams that indulged during the profligate 1990’s to a few key players today. This certainly is good news for the embryonic corporate lawyer – more power breakfasts mean more deals, which means more business for all the various parasites that buzz around the pulsing body of American capitalism. But the news, good though it is, leaves a question in the mind of the discerning food obsessive – what exactly is a power breakfast, and can the dedicated home chef do better?

The first part of that question benefits from an examination of one of the most famous venues for that important sounding meal. Michael’s Restaurant in New York offers a selection of typical foods for the spendthrift wheeler dealer – a fruit salad for $13.00, topped with yogurt for $19.00. Eggs Benedict, the traditional poached egg dish, goes for a mere $16.00: for the same price you can get the cured rather than smoked salmon delicacy gravlax, accompanied by what one hopes is a good bagel. As for baked goods, the best Michael’s does is either brioche toast or fresh baked muffins – for $4.50 and $5.50 respectively.

These options all sound perfectly pleasant, of course. One could hardly expect otherwise for so much money, and a very superior gravlax may indeed be worth it. But in case you haven’t closed a deal recently, or can’t envision spending that much money to pretend that you have, I’ve got a few suggestions.

I hardly can imagine a really good breakfast without baked goods and sweets. These, to me, are the cornerstone of the morning indulgence, even more so than the ever-present panoply of egg dishes. Certainly, an elegant rolled omelet is wonderful if you’re careful about the quality of the butter and the egg– but even it bows in my mind before the shapely blonde twins Challah and Brioche. The latter is sweet, rich, deeply indulgent, and in its most extreme forms veritably groans under the weight of some 200 grams of good butter and three pure eggs per bread. Its Jewish sibling is rather more austere, and yet no less delicious for all that, sweetened at its best with honey rather than sugar, devoid of the butter that gives the brioche its pillowy softness and yet endowed with a more formidable texture in return. Either one of these alone, with a steaming bowl of coffee or cup of tea, would serve as a perfectly excellent breakfast for me. And when I say either one of these, I do mean the whole thing – I’ve rarely succeeded in stopping after a few slices, though once in a blue moon I will remember how nice stale brioche French toast tastes the next morning, or that toasted brioche goes particularly well with a rough country pate and pickles.

I admit, though, that some eaters of good taste might prefer a more varied beginning, even if they prefer to stay within the bounds imposed by flour, eggs, butter, and sugar. In the fall, you wouldn’t go wrong with thinking about pumpkins in the form of this densely sweet pumpkin and orange syrup, though I doubt that ice cream or what we seem to call yogurt really has any business accompanying an already satisfying cake. Moderation is the acme of cooking, it seems to me – if adding more butter or sugar or cream made a better dish, then our greatest cooks would need to learn nothing more. That’s why some people might prefer a hearty date bread for breakfast, served warm and perhaps spread with the thinnest drizzle of your favorite topping, just to add the faintest hint of flavor.

But baked goods alone do not a power breakfast make. I can already hear the winged perpetrators of Atkins’s folly complaining, with some justification. These are all carbs, they say. And certainly, we shouldn’t stop with merely the items I’ve listed. Many people have bad memories of scrambled eggs as a lumpy disaster of institutional cooking, but this hardly needs to be the case. Either cooked three per person for a few moments in a hot pan with singing fat, or slowly nursed to gentle curds in a double boiler, and finished luxuriously with rich cream, scrambled eggs served with sturdy oatcakes and perhaps a naturally smoked kipper simmered gently in milk for a few minutes are one of the best breakfasts. As the great food writer Richard Olney has written, “correctly prepared, . . . scrambled eggs number among the very great delicacies of the table”.

Nor do I automatically discount the stranger entrants to the world of morning eating. My favorite among this motley band, however, is the imperial Kedgeree, a fragrant, delicious rice of eggs, smoked fish, and threads of vibrant saffron (or powdered turmeric, if your aesthetic sense demands yellow but your wallet dare not), all turned enthusiastically in either bought or home made ghee. As for Michael’s “Benedict”, I frankly prefer my poached eggs perched atop day old French bread toasted lightly with a little oil, and anointed first with mushroom puree flavored with sherry or vermouth, light cream, thyme, and lemon, and then finished if you’re feeling particularly indulgent or successful with a hollandaise of more butter whisked into three whipped eggs over a light fire.

Obviously, this rather long post hardly exhausts the possibilities for the dealmaker or the serious eater. It’s with some trepidation that I leave out beignets, a recipe for how to make gravlax, a stab at bagels and bialys, some suggestions about cream cheese, and recipes for waffles and pancakes. I shudder to think that some deprived soul might forget about cinnamon rolls because I’ve forgotten to mention them, and if I had more time I would delve into the vexed questions of the precise type of butter, brand of coffee, or leaf of tea. But for the moment I’ll leave the topic content, for it’s night again – and well, I’m hungry.