Billy Renkl: A Breakfast Conversation

Love and Grits and the Clink of China Cups

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Photography by Susan Bryant

Back in the early days of Covid, when life felt like the first ten minutes of the movie The Andromeda Strain — none of us really knew what was going on, or what was going to happen, or the precise (or even vague) level of our danger with any accuracy — I found myself going inward.

By this I do not mean closing the front door and just moving my meetings to Zoom, which I did; we all did that. I felt, and continue to feel, that Covid was the great cosmic downshift, the great tap-on-the-shoulder from He/She/They/It who requested in some fashion that we stop already and look: look at what might be if only we ceased running and fighting and needing to be right and needing to get ahead. If nothing else, Covid showed me how profoundly connected we were and are, and how much beauty we are surrounded by, every minute of every day, if we’d only open our eyes for a few minutes.

I do know this: in my life and immediate community, the bees returned; the birds came back, and the world — amidst such death and abject sorrow — was beautiful. A light here requires a shadow there, said Mrs Ramsay in To The Lighthouse, and she was right. It was not limited to the natural world, though, that was suddenly no longer being sprayed to kill the weeds and invasives and everything else along with it; the beauty extended to music and art. I remember watching the clip of Italians in Siena stepping out onto their balconies to sing together, and I wept for us all, for the knowledge that, at core, humans retreat to the quietly divine even at the very worst of moments, and even if we do not want to admit it. We are the storytelling species, the art-makers, the beauty seekers. And one of the art-makers whose work I fell in love with during Covid — hook, line, and sinker — was Billy Renkl.

I knew of Billy’s work from his stunning collaborations with his sister, the extraordinary writer Margaret Renkl, whose writing has saved and continues to save me when I begin to lose hope for humanity. I didn’t put two and two together: Billy is married to my friend Susan Bryant, also a visual artist whose beautiful work I discovered in the early days of lockdown. All of which means: I surrounded myself with art during those days, and long after they were over, the need for it in my life has stuck. I fell hard for Billy’s illustrations for The Comfort of Crows, and I follow his work, which is ineffable, wherever it is possible to see it. And (almost) more than anything else, I awaken every morning to see what he has posted on social media: a daily photograph taken at dawn during a walk on, as Billy calls it, the most beautiful morning in the history of the world.

Billy is a Southerner; he and his siblings grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and he now teaches drawing and illustration at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee. I had the sense that he might have something to say about breakfast, and I was right — even breakfast-for-dinner, which is one of my favorite things in the world. Here is what he shared:

“Plenty” - courtesy of Billy Renkl. Used by permission.

BR: First let me say this: I have no understanding of people who suffer through breakfast with their Sinners At The Hands Of An Angry God Brand Unsweetened Rye Flakes With Added Wheat Germ (Bought on sale. In bulk.) That's not the life I want for myself.

EA: Fair enough. I have eaten many breakfasts in the South, and they have never once involved unsweetened rye flakes with added wheat germ. Red-eye gravy, yes, but no wheat germ. But to the questions at hand: of all meals, breakfast seems to me to be the most personal and ritualistic. What is on your table every morning? Does it change on the weekends? Are you the weekend breakfast-maker?

BR: I still wake up hungry, every single morning. My wife does not. In this as in so many things, she is a mystery. The dog needs to go out when she hears me getting up, which means I'll have to get the sort of dressed that will do if I leave the porch light off. Then I stand in the cold, dark kitchen and think about what will be my pre-breakfast (the prekfast?): it's almost always three chocolate chip cookies. Unless it's four. You'd think I'd get tired of chocolate cookies in the dark every morning, but you'd be wrong.

After I walk, and shower, and the sun comes up, and I let the dog out again, and the day launches – then I eat actual breakfast. My breakfast is pretty straightforward, some combination of these few things: yogurt, granola, fruit, toast with butter and jam.

EA: I've found that the children of breakfast people tend to grow up to be breakfast people. Is this true in your case? Did you grow up in a breakfast-loving household? What was your childhood breakfast tradition like? 

BR: We were post-Vatican II Catholics, and my parents loved the Sunday evening "folk" service. The brilliance of this arrangement, not lost on my parents I'm sure, was that we got to sleep in before a big, loud family breakfast on Sunday morning and still go to mass that night.

Sunday breakfast was the only elaborate breakfast of the week, and by elaborate I'm referring to volume. My mom grew up on a solidly pragmatic cotton/peanut farm in south Alabama and my dad had no family food traditions at all. Sunday mornings they worked in tandem and with fierce intent: pancakes or waffles, grits, scrambled eggs, fruit, bacon, sausage, and the other sausage. Because this was Alabama and sugar maples don't make it that far south, we had Mrs. Butterworth's – which I am aware is amber-colored high fructose corn syrup – and she's in my cabinet right now and I am 235% fine with that.

EA: I suspect you’re right about Mrs. Butterworth. Also, is it odd to say that this Jewish New Yorker from Queens played guitar for four years of Catholic Newman House folk clubs while in college? The Sunday evening folk mass thing seemed to be very popular schedule-wise among my Catholic friends, even in New England. Given Mrs Butterworth but also the chocolate chip cookie situation, I suspect a sweet/salty sensibility. Which is why ham and syrup and biscuits work so well. Was your dad a breakfast guy?

BR: Sometimes, when breakfast was late or my dad was operating solo, he would make the perfect breakfast sandwich: a good salty ham with sharp cheddar cheese and mayo on cinnamon-raisin bread and butter used for grilling in a skillet. I stopped eating meat almost forty years ago, but if I slipped, it would be for that sandwich. It had the perfect breakfast taste trifecta: salty, sweet, fat. [EA: I am assuming the mayo was Duke’s?]

 That's pretty much what you would need to launch any day of the week, of course. As it happens, a slice of chocolate cake and some barbeque potato chips also have salty, sweet, and fat in spades. I'm not saying I had that for one hurried breakfast last week, and I'm not saying I didn't.

I'm in charge of cake at our house, including all birthday cakes. A companionable birthday dinner followed by candles on a cake is nice, but nothing compared to birthday cake for breakfast the next morning. Really, it's sort of the point of birthday cake, isn't it?

EA: I know that you do a fair amount of traveling; is there anything that you long for/have to have/must have/carry with you in the mornings when you aren't home?

BR: Have I mentioned grits yet?

For a stretch of years, from middle school into high school, my morning went like this: I was the first in the house to wake up. I'd stumble into the kitchen and put water on to boil. When it was ready I would make a cup of instant coffee for each of my parents, in the same two green cups, stirring in some milk and sugar. The thin China cups would ring as the spoon knocked the sides, one of the singular, specific, and concrete sounds of my childhood. I'd carry the cups of coffee into my parents' bedroom and wake them, and then get in the shower. (My sisters and I had to all get ready for school in the same small bathroom, so someone had to go first, which I think started as the point of this ritual.)

By the time I'd gotten dressed, Mom would have breakfast ready for me, always the same thing: instant grits with butter melting on the top, and cinnamon-sugar toast. That was every school day morning, five days a week, for years: grits and cinnamon toast. The first time I heard the phrase "comfort food," I knew instantly what it meant. If I have a hard day, if I'm grieving something, or if I'm both hungry and also too exhausted to eat — especially if I'm alone – I make grits and cinnamon toast.

I once had a six-month residency in a small town outside of Basel, Switzerland. I managed quite well, what with a pastry shop around one corner and a bakery around the other, a fresh vegetable market, splendid Italian wine that cost almost nothing, French cheeses, and everywhere the most wonderful bread I'd ever eaten. (The breads in Switzerland ruined me, and I came home a snob, to a town that had no bread for me). But still I longed for grits, and polenta wasn't the same thing. I wrote to my parents, “Please send grits. Also, please send peanut better. Jiff."

EA: What is one of the more extraordinary breakfasts you've had? Where were you?

BR: I like breakfasting when we travel because I like being outside of my own life, tangent to other lives. I can't think of one extraordinary breakfast, but I can think of lots of extraordinary mornings, and breakfast would have been part of them. Every morning in Guatemala we had scrambled eggs with black beans and some lovely, salty, crumbly white cheese. In Venice we ate on a tiny balcony – soft cheese that was almost butter and rustic bread and actual butter and jam and oranges. In the Yucatan, the bakeries opened with sunrise, and we ate pastries that felt rich and dense. (If I'd thought about it, I would have guessed at lard, so I resolutely didn't think about it.) In Istanbul our hotel was directly across from the Sultan Ahmed Mosque: from the minarets, the faithful were called to prayer in the new light, and we were called to a breakfast in the tiny courtyard at the front of our tiny, 6-room hotel which was in itself a kind of morning prayer. I don't remember what we ate, but I know we were eating an intoxicating beauty.

EA: As a visual artist, do you find that breakfast ever influences the work you do later in the day? (A crazy, nutty question, but you'd be surprised.)

BR: I don't guess so. My work starts in my head the minute I wake up, whether it's illustration, studio work, or the class I'll be teaching soon, or the side bed that needs weeding. If I lay there, my unhelpful brain is happy to provide me with other things to think about, such as the stupid thing I said that one time at the cafeteria table in ninth grade, or the many ways my sore elbow might be signaling imminent death, or the certain eventuality that the brakes will fail on our youngest son's 17-year-old Honda (I'm riffing on Roz Chast's brilliant 'Insomnia Jepardy' bit for The New Yorker)  – so I pre-empt all that by thinking about something immediate and necessary, like the lecture I'm about to give on color, and get right up. If anything, the day's accelerating work influences breakfast.

EA: It's a quiet weekend morning; your schedule is open and there's nowhere you have to be. Do you prefer to have breakfast in or out? What would be the ideal scenario for you? It's been my experience that, as adults, we become somewhat steadfast in our breakfast styles and habits, especially when we're single. When Susan and I got together almost 25 years ago, we faced an impasse: she was tea, I was coffee; she was sweet, I was savory. She eventually won me over by making me a breakfast of the most extraordinarily perfect poached eggs on toast that I've ever eaten anywhere, before or since. Has being married altered or changed what or how you both eat breakfast?

BR: Nope. Our relationship is full of rich and varied tenderness, but breakfast is not one of them. Unless you mean breakfast for supper! Now that feels like a genius move every single time. It usually comes out of nowhere – something else has even been planned and shopped for. But then we're too tired to follow a recipe (wearing, like, glasses), and certainly too tired to decide if the recipe's amount of garlic is reasonable, and to locate the one-third cup measure which is always somewhere other than the drawer it's supposed to be in, and then one of us will say, What about breakfast, instead? and it feels like a transgressive revelation every single time. The Mrs. Butterworth comes out.

EA: Will you share one of your favorite breakfast recipes with us?

When I was in elementary school, we spent time at our grandparent's house in rural south Alabama during the summers. Blackberries grew in imposing fairy-tale-scaled brambles, and some mornings we'd walk down the road and pick them. Back in the kitchen Mimi would wash them, sprinkle them with sugar, and then pour whole cream over them in a cereal bowl. I can't think of anything that tastes better to me in my life. (Also: what were they thinking? The place would have been thick with rattlesnakes and copperheads! Good grief!) There were also wild plums by the side of the road and in a thicket around the pump. The kitchen garden grew corn, field peas, tomatoes, eggplant, purple-hulled peas, snap peas, peppers, yellow squash, zucchini, cantaloup, turnip greens, and watermelon. If you'd asked Mimi about kale she would have looked at you blankly. Her neighbor grew sugar cane when I was very young, and so sometimes there was molasses to go with the corn pone. Here is her pound cake recipe.

Mrs. Tommie’s Pound Cake Recipe

Not quite the Renkl poundcake, but maybe close.

Billy says: This is a breakfast food only because there is no time of day for which it isn't the right food. I think of it as Mimi's Pound Cake recipe, but she would have corrected me if she heard me say it. For her entire life, even after having made it a hundred times, she thought of it as "Tommie's Pound Cake Recipe."  Mrs. Tommie Waters was her neighbor and best friend for 60 years, and she would never miss a chance at that attribution, out of love for Tommie.

This cake can be anything: with strawberries and whipped cream it is my wife's favorite birthday cake; it's good as an afternoon snack with marmalade. It packs well in lunches and is great for a little something just before bed. For breakfast, it really shines when toasted with butter. Susan never fails to remind me that I am putting butter onto what is essentially butter cake, and for 30 years I've replied with "What's your point?"

3 sticks butter at room temperature

3 cups sugar

2 teaspoon vanilla

8 ounces block of cream cheese, at room temperature

8 eggs

3 cups flour

Preheat oven to 300 degrees F.

In a large bowl, cream together butter, sugar, vanilla, and cream cheese. Alternate adding eggs and flour.

Pour the batter into a very large lightly greased tube pan and bake at 300º for 1 1/2 to 2 hours, until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.

Note from Billy: there are no typos in the ingredients list. Also, I don't have a tube pan that big and I make the cake in a bundt pan and the cake annex in a small loaf pan.

Thank you, Billy, for everything.