Andy Hoffman
My romance with breakfast began in the woods. At maybe six years old and maybe six in the morning, I woke up to see the amazing place my family had landed. A doctor and a lifelong scout, my father had organized the medical service for a huge Boy Scout Reservation in Rhode Island. He had attended Yawgoog as a child, and always loved the place, a couple thousand acres that felt a thousand miles away from everything else. We had a cabin by a lake, woods to explore, and what felt like complete freedom.
I left my brother asleep—I thought the whole family was asleep still—and sat on the porch looking at the water. Then I saw my dad rowing an aluminum boat across the pond. He had beaten me awake by an hour, walking over to Sandy Beach and appropriating the boat for the doctors’ use throughout the summer. I went out to meet him. He showed me how to dock the boat, tying the lead rope to an iron stake pounded into the rocks from which we swam, and then, ruffling my hair, asked: “Hungry?”
We went to the kitchen, quietly, and mixed up the batter for johnnycakes, a Rhode Island specialty made from corn meal, water, and eggs. The batter should sit a while, to soften the gritty meal, which gave us time to build a fire in the pit we had made the year before. I gathered kindling and thicker branches from the nearest woods while my father set the logs on which the grate would sit. He instructed me on how to make a cooking fire, different from a signal fire or a heating fire, a small hot nest of coals.
As the wood caught and began to collapse into coals, we went back inside. My brother and sister were up, dressed in bathing suits, and my mother stood by the bowl of batter, tsking at the mess we had made creating this simple meal. My father took two cast-iron frying pans, handing the smaller one to me. Outside, he set the grill over the coals and the pans on the grill. We went back inside and got a pound of bacon, a cup of water, several plates, and the bowl of batter.
When we got back to the fire, we tested the pans by flicking water on them. The drops immediately boiled off. My dad smiled and asked me to peel of strips of bacon. He laid them on the hot pans. The strips sizzled and smelled like nothing else, combining with the pine woods and fresh lake water. He placed the crisp bacon on a plate and dolloped the johnnycake batter into the quarter-inch of bacon fat. The cakes cooked quickly, plump hot corn-meal disks.
When we had almost finished the batter, my father added more water to what remained. “Because your mother likes with cripsy edges,” laying it just the way: crip-sy. The batter spread out on the hot pans and formed a filigree. These thin johnnycakes we a completely different food from the puffy one we had cooked before. In a few minutes we had plates full of bacon and two kinds of johnnycakes, and the five of us sat, sticky from the maple syrup my mother had put in a cut-glass pitcher.
Wouldn’t anyone fall in love with a breakfast like that? And, after, with breakfast anywhere?