What We Eat When We Eat Alone - Deborah Madison [10]
Take a small soup tureen—the individual soup tureen you would use for a soupe gratinée, or a sturdy bowl in fireproof china. Pour in your milky coffee, prepared and sugared according to taste. Cut some hearty slices of bread—use household bread, refined white will not do—butter them lavishly and lay them on the coffee, ensuring that they are not submerged. Then all you have to do is place the whole thing in the oven and leave it there until your breakfast is browned and crusty, with fat buttery bubbles sizzling here and there on the surface.
Finally, Colette advises, “Before breaking your raft of roasted bread, sprinkle on some salt.” Even a small trace of salt counteracts the sugar and makes everything sharp and bright.
I copied this passage from a book in someone else’s library over twenty years ago because it spoke to me, but I never thought to write down the translator, who remains a mystery still. In the attempt to find this translation, I started reading various others. A less lavish version turned the same breakfast into something so prosaic that I read through practically the whole paragraph before recognizing the raft-crusted bowl of coffee. Perhaps the tender attention to detail in the first translation is what turned a somewhat rough and personal dish into nothing less than a morning sacrament. If so, with the right words, oyster crackers in coffee might be equally sacramental.
Oyster crackers in coffee, yes, but perhaps our woman in the kitchen uses a cup with an especially wide mouth and enough cream to turn the black filtered coffee the color of ivory. I wonder if the oyster crackers cover the surface, so that they just touch one another, or not. Does she take a sip of coffee with a cracker from a spoon? Is the cracker soft below and crisp on top? As she goes along, does she add more crackers? One by one or by the handful?
I’ve never had coffee with oyster crackers so I don’t know the nature of its particular charms, but surely there would be those minute particulars that say why coffee and why oyster crackers and not some other kind, the very details that make personal foods so important.
Largely, though, personal foods are stunningly strange. The following examples are offered for your amusement only, as these aren’t things we could make into recipes, and we don’t think you should either.
Five Bad Ideas
1. Mustard sandwich with reworked coffee: “Use Yellow Heinz Mustard. Slather the mustard on a flour tortilla and eat accompanied with reworked coffee, which means add a few new grounds to the top of a paper filter of morning coffee and pour in boiling water.”
2. Potato-sesame bread with tequila mix: “Toss an old loaf of potato-sesame bread on a wood-burning stove. Tear into hunks and eat with tequila mix right out of the plastic bottle.”
3. Organic goo goo: “Get Green Giant small whole peas and one package of any Green Giant rice mix—Asian, Mexican, and so forth. Make a small cut in the top to prevent an explosion, and microwave them in their own microwavable pouches. During the six or so minutes they’re cooking, look in the spice closet and find some less-than-a-year-old spice, a young spice. Any spice will do. Cut open the two hot pouches with a knife and pour on a plate with the rice on the bottom, the peas on the top. Sprinkle with spice. This fits right into the Asian diet pyramid. It’s a good dish if you don’t have a maid or a dishwasher, since it uses only a fork, a knife, and a plate.”
4. Leftover spaghetti sandwich: Usually in cooking, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Here, it is less. The day after a big spaghetti feed, a friend—who is most of the time a good and lusty kind of cook—uses the leftovers to make spaghetti sandwiches.
“I rewarm the garlic bread in the toaster and the tomato sauce and the pasta