Plenty of Fat and Fried Potatoes: The American Breakfast

Bacon and fried potatoes, eggs, pancakes and French toast – the American breakfast is a national institution.

Lines form on the weekends. Come rain or snow, at 8:00 a.m. the line outside Boston’s Paramount already stretches far down the street, where crispy-fried bacon, fresh omelets and sweet pastries can be imagined, but their scent not yet savored. This scene is repeated every weekend all across America, not only outside urbane brunch diners like the Paramount, but in front of obscure places like “Rosie’s Diner,” located in the provincial no man’s land at the foot of New Hampshire’s White Mountains. There, guests sit before their sturdy breakfast platters with faces as secretive as the countryside surrounding them while Rosie, with her hair in a braid, scurries about between the tables. Cooling one’s heels in anticipation of a hot breakfast is an American ritual.

The all-American breakfast, as the hearty meal of eggs, bacon and fried potatoes is usually called, is an elemental part of the national wellbeing. In the wake of the financial crash, Harvard University announced it planned to cut back on hot breakfasts in the student cafeterias, an announcement that was seen as scandalous, a pathetic display for such a venerable educational institution. How dare tradition-rich Harvard do away with part of the American national identity?!?

During his tenure as a professor at the University of Chicago, Barack Obama frequented the legendary Valois for breakfast. Students sat there in a sort of dining hall next to tweed-jacketed professors, uniformed cops, construction workers and pensioners. The restaurant started serving at 5:30 a.m. and food was cooked on the “griddle,” as the large, open frying surfaces are known in the United States. There, eggs, bacon, potatoes, thick pancakes and French toast sizzled side by side in peaceful coexistence. As you passed through, you told the griddle chef what you wanted and his team prepared all the orders, seemingly simultaneously, in record time. By the time everything was cooked, you had your coffee, orange juice and toast already on your tray and were standing in front of the cashier.

It’s a well-known rule in America that you get the best breakfast at places frequented by long-haul truck drivers and policemen or at those places with the longest waiting lines. Usually, breakfast is served anytime of the day. The basic combination of eggs and bacon is often augmented and varied with the addition of other items. You should spend some time making your choices because as soon as the waitress (in diners, the personnel are almost always female, and they’ll almost always call you “Honey”) pulls out her order pad like a teacher in front of a classroom, the ping-pong game of the breakfast ritual has begun.

If you order two eggs, the waitress immediately comes back with the follow-up question, “How do you want ‘em?” As soon as you say “Over easy” (lightly done on both sides), the next round starts: home fries or hash browns? That’s followed by the meat alternatives: bacon or sausage? Then, finally, the toast question: white, whole wheat or rye? The preference quiz is done with such Monty Python-like seriousness that when it’s over, you’re just happy if you haven’t ordered the wrong thing.

This A to Z exercise varies depending on what part of the United States you’re in. In some places, the potatoes are grated; in others they’re sliced and in yet others they may be cubed. In the southern states they might be completely replaced by grits, a sort of cornmeal mush. Eggs come in almost every form imaginable from “sunny side up” (fried with the yolk facing up), “over easy” (flipped briefly to fry the yolk side), “over medium” (fried a little longer on the yolk side), poached, scrambled or as an omelet. The most exotic variation in America is boiled.

Although America’s breakfast is held up as such a national institution that Hollywood films show soldiers returning home and seated before a plate of bacon and eggs as if they were symbolic of home and mother, it’s not an American invention. British immigrants brought the bacon and eggs combination with them from England and the Americans added their own twists.

Today’s image of the all-American breakfast goes back to a marketing idea that was pedaled to the public in the 1920s. A bacon producer, as the story goes, hired influential public relations agent Edward Bernays to try to drum up sales for his bacon. Bernays, one of Sigmund Freud’s nephews, was also responsible for popularizing cigarette smoking among women. He launched an ad campaign praising big breakfasts with the help of paid “experts,” who called them essential to good health. Reduced to a catchy advertising slogan, the English “full breakfast” became the American “bacon and eggs.” It had a catchy, almost jazz-like rhythm. It made no difference what you added to that breakfast; it stayed “bacon and eggs.” “What did you have for breakfast this morning?” “Bacon and eggs.”

The all-American breakfast fit in perfectly with the booming diner/fast food culture of the Roaring Twenties. The uncontested icons of this era were the so-called “boxcar diners” that were copied directly from the Pullman railroad dining cars. Some of these old originals have survived down through the years. Wilson’s Diner in Boston is an original aluminum-sided diner dating from the 1940s. It opens for business at 5:00 a.m. and closes at 3:00 p.m.. An egg yolk-yellow sign above the huge griddle greets you with “Good Morning!” As if in a railroad dining car, customers eat in small booths or on barstools at a blue and white tiled counter, where they can watch the cook as he fries the eggs and shovels a mountain of home fries around with his spatula.

Wolfgang Koeppen visited just such a diner in the late 1950s during his “American Journey.” He wasn’t very enthusiastic on the subject of the all-American breakfast. “Accompanying the fried eggs,” he wrote, “they served fried potatoes and so early in the day! The toast was sticky, having been dragged through melted butter, and stuck to my hands.” The all-American breakfast, in fact, has nothing to do with haute cuisine. It’s not meant to. Even First Lady Michelle Obama, on the subject of improving America’s diet, confessed on ABC television, “We’re bacon people,” by which she didn’t mean she and her husband were strictly meat eaters. She meant to show loyalty to the simple American lifestyle exemplified by the fundamentally democratic, if not exactly healthy, fried food culture.

Bacon and eggs are the great social equalizers there, just as the boulette* and currywurst are here. Breakfast has become increasingly sterile since the 1970s at fast food chains such as Denny’s or IHOP. The all-American breakfast still holds its ground against the Starbucks croissant-light-mocha-latte culture. In the meantime, the workday version is likely to be of the “to go” variety, like an Egg McMuffin or a “breakfast wrap,” both of which are now available in a low-cholesterol, yolk-free version. The full breakfast feast is usually put off to the weekend these days. Then customers patiently wait in long lines, where Americans feel the most American.

*Editor’s note: Boulette is a large, fried ground beef meatball usually served as a snack with mustard and bread.