James Salter is the third seat at our oval, low-set breakfast table. Or he could be, going by the number of times he crops up in mealtime conversations between my husband and me. “Life is weather. Life is meals.” That line onwards, I have been a fan of the American fighter pilot-turned-writer. His words on food — there are deliciously many — encapsulate the art of preparing and eating so wholly that any attempt to append is but trivial.
“The meal is the essential act of life.” “The meal is the emblem of civilisation. What would one know of life as it should be lived or nights as they should be spent apart from meals?” he writes in the book Life is Meals – A Food Lover’s Book of Days , co-authored with his wife Kay. As pretty a book as the sentences it contains, a copy is placed at an arm’s length from our table, so we can conveniently reach for it, especially at the end of dinner, and read the day’s entry from it. Better still, when breakfast is done and we want to linger, before disappearing into the day.
I prescribe to the belief that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Health benefits apart, it is a languid prelude to the rest of the day. (I feel obligated to acknowledge that there are various privileges that one is well aware of in the course of these thoughts.)
Food is habitual, routine, prosaic, quotidian. On an eventless day, where its presence is not lacking, all things considered, food is so integrated into routine as to be inconsequential, another chore to tick off from the list. Yet, when one stops to smell the proverbial roses, food, really, is everything and everywhere in every human action. Each meal seems to own a set of behaviours, non-transferable to another part of the day. Lunch is a hurried pit-stop, one lingers over it only at the severe risk of losing what is left of the fading hours. Dinner, if not elaborate and a noteworthy occasion, comes at the tail end; it’s too late now to do anything about the plans for the day, and there is too much pressure on this meal alone to salvage what might have been the fate of the day.
Now breakfast, on the other hand, introduces possibilities. It exudes a sense of unmeasured potential. There is possibility that smells like great coffee. And then there is so much you can do with a breakfast menu.
There is a certain charm to laying out a good breakfast on a table, the newspaper folded in half so that the masthead is partly visible, and coffee. “Breakfast, breaking the fast since dinner the previous night, is a reflection of the country in which you eat it,” said Salter. Al fresco on the terrace, sitting on hand-painted chairs, our plates are perched on a high stool/table fashioned by dad, with a waiting dog hoping for a bite to fall his way. The newspaper is in two parts, hers and his. Emily Post, well known for her writings on etiquette in the modern world, said that breakfast is the only meal where it is permissible to read a newspaper or book. The morning air is still crisp, the sun warming our back. Toast with fruits, eggs, peanut butter, or dosa and chutney, or something else — breakfast is a brief, conscious break where we have the time to slow and stretch. Post-meal, it is a hop, skip and jump to check things off the list of chores. Breakfast feels like the only time available when we give ourselves wholly to the meal, and it to us. Thus, the urge to observe, to cherish the ability to indulge in such detail.
At breakfast, one does not feel compelled to make conversation, unlike the other meals of the day where there is an expectation, sometimes a hope that there will be talk, however inane. There are rarely guests at the breakfast table. Even if there are, the coffee is usually only just kicking in, and one is allowed silence.
If I suggest that you have breakfast every day, I will sound unnuanced toward your compulsions, if breakfast isn’t really your thing. Maybe you are a group that lunches. Or throws the most-anticipated dinner parties. The thing is, Salter again here, “The rhythm of working and eating defines the life of every individual, and the dizzying edifice made up of all the civilisation and savage tribes of history is based on food.” Breakfast is when I stop, linger, recalibrate. A day that begins with a good breakfast is a good one already.
Deepa Bhasthi is a writer living and working between Kodagu and Bengaluru