Katherine May: A Breakfast Conversation

On the Joy of a Proper Breakfast

For subscribers both free and paid:

In the coming months, Poor Man’s Feast will be featuring breakfast conversations with a wide variety of artists, writers, musicians, and thinkers. It will almost always include a recipe.

Each conversation will be released for paid subscribers only and live in the archives. Free subscribers will have access to a portion of the conversation, as always. A portion of the proceeds of every breakfast conversation will be donated to a number of organizations dedicated to feeding children at both the macro and micro levels, beginning with Save the Children.

Thank you - Elissa

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Katherine May Photo by Alexa Loy Dent

When I began thinking about this monthly column, I realized that there were certain truisms (of my own making) that I was bringing to the table. First: that breakfast is the great culinary leveler. Meaning: most of us eat it or a version of it, and for most of us — and whether we realize it or not — it tends to have a quiet, comforting mystique about it. Second: it is a deeply intimate act, this nourishing and nurturing of oneself after a night of rest, or excess, or love, or work. Because it is a universal language, we tend to take it for granted on the one hand or romanticize it on the other, precisely because of its mundanity. Either way, one is lucky to be able to have it at all, or to remember having a particularly memorable one, especially knowing that not everyone does. I worry specifically about the children who depend upon their depleted school system budgets to provide it, or the ones who are caught up in horrific violence and war through no fault of their own and can hardly find a place to lay their tender heads much less create a single spark with which to warm their morning tea.

Breakfast, for me, is about custom, rite, and personal idiosyncracy. It has a particularly private sensibility about it. My paternal grandmother was fond of mashing a can of water-packed skinless and boneless Norwegian sardines together with a cup of cottage cheese; the thought of it makes me swoon while its appearance on our morning table with coffee and the paper makes Susan want to book a one-way, spur-of-the-moment trip to New Zealand.

I am entirely a savoury person when it comes to breakfast: no sweet pastries or jams or jellies (or even pancakes with syrup) for me. When Susan and I first got together and I found her spreading Welch’s grape jelly on a bagel, I nearly fainted on the spot, and not in a good way.

I grew up with fairly standard salty/savoury breakfast fare: bacon or ham and eggs with buttered toast, bagels and lox, coffee. It took me years before I realized that the breakfast world was my oyster, so to speak, and that every food culture I love — Indian, Middle Eastern, British, Spanish, Scandinavian, Japanese, Vietnamese, Chinese — has very specific breakfast traditions, and only a few of them are sweet. Over the years, I’ve gone on long breakfast spates of miso soup with broiled fish and rice, pickled Danish herring, very spicy curried eggs, fry-ups with Marmite and toast, pho, you name it. Like the food writer John Thorne, who famously wrote about his love of savoury breakfasts in his 1999 Los Angeles Times essay Diary of a Breakfast Outlaw, I want my breakfast to be salty, soft, and rich. He says,

What makes the perfect savoury breakfast? I know the shape of this breakfast more by what I don’t want than by what I do. It has to go with hot black coffee, which rules out certain savoury Asian breakfasts that I would otherwise enjoy: congee with all the toppings, a big bowl of noodles afloat in a spicy broth. I don’t want a sirloin steak or sliced leg of lamb or pork chops or anything I have to seriously chew. I want my breakfast to be salty, soft and rich. I want that richness spread out on something crisp. A grilled cheese sandwich has the perfect balance--as does, for that matter, a plate of hot buttered toast. And most of all, I want to eat slowly, meditatively, eyes turned toward the morning brightness outside the window but focused on nothing.

I don’t necessarily agree with him about black coffee ruling out certain savoury Asian breakfasts (which I could eat every day of my life), and I would have to disagree with him about sirloin steak; I will happily have steak leftovers sliced, piled on good sourdough toast rubbed with a garlic clove and drizzled with olive oil. That said, he is right about a plate of hot buttered toast, and I think that my dear friend Katherine May, author of Enchantment, Wintering, and The Electricity of Every Living Thing, would likely agree.

When Katherine and I chat, we almost always end up talking about food: what did she make for the holidays, what is she making for supper, what did she have for lunch, and so on. So I was delighted to have Katherine share her (delicious) thoughts on breakfast with me, particularly because I know in my heart: she is a very good cook.

Photo by Alexa Loy Dent

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?

I might be a rare thing - a variable breakfaster! I do always eat a breakfast though, and it’s usually substantial. I start with a pot of strong tea, loose-leaf, as soon as I get up. I probably drink two or three mugs, but I only like it piping hot, so I usually waste half of every cup because it’s gone lukewarm. 

Then I tend to get hungry an hour or two later, and I have to decide what I fancy on that day. I quite often have poached eggs on toast (with Marmite on the toast), or an open sandwich with salmon, avocado and cucumber, or fried tomatoes and mushrooms on toast. Occasionally it’s porridge with banana on top. One of my favourites is a masala omelette, which I first had in Rajasthan. It’s a thin omelette with little bits of fried onion, ginger and chilli, folded up into a sandwich with tamarind ketchup. There are few things more cheering in the morning than this. 

At weekends, I sometimes have what my family calls ‘coopie eggs’, which is just soft boiled eggs with toast soldiers. I alway have Marmite on my soldiers too. In my view, tea and Marmite on toast is the solution to all of life’s problems. I have a theory that the reason Americans tend not to like the stuff is because it doesn’t go well with coffee. Marmite requires a lot of butter and strong, milky tea on the side. It’s the English equivalent of a wine pairing. 

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? 

I’m afraid not! I think I’m the only devoted breakfaster in my family. I’m not sure my Mum even ate breakfast when I was growing up, although she’s now a devotee of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes. I’m not a great fan of cereal at all - it’s too floaty for mornings. 

But when I was in my late teens, my Mum started cooking breakfast for me before I went to school, often eggs and bacon with a Weetabix on the side. I’m not sure how it happened; possibly she was trying to feed my brain for all the studying I was doing. Either way, the habit stuck. 

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

I always panic a bit that I’ll wake up in a hotel with nothing to eat, and so I bring cereal bars and bags of almonds with me, just in case. I don’t know where I get the idea that I’ll starve without a full supply of nutrients in my bag, but apparently that’s the case. 

If I’m travelling abroad, I sheepishly admit to bringing my own tea bags. I don’t like drinking coffee in the morning, and Lipton English Breakfast is nothing like English English Breakfast - it’s just so weak! I pack Pluckley Tea Bags, which of course don’t taste like home, because the milk and the water are always different; but they’re a decent approximation of home at least. 

On the other hand, I love hotel breakfasts, especially if they’re delivered to my room. It feels like such a luxury when a trolley is wheeled in with a white tablecloth and silverware. I’m very happy for someone else to cook my poached eggs. 

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

My whole family are still reminiscing about the hotel buffet breakfast we had in Belgium a couple of years ago. It was just hilariously opulent. They silently handed you a glass of champagne as you entered the room as if this were a cocktail party, and then there was the most extraordinary range of food I’d ever seen in one place. To describe it is to diminish it, but there was a full seafood buffet, about twenty cheeses, a deli’s worth of cold cuts, a boulangerie of different breads. There was steak. There were fresh waffles. There was a cornucopia of fruit. It was just ridiculous. 

On a very different note, I have vivid memories of having millet porridge, paratha and chai at 5 am in the Ranthambore National Park, before heading out in a jeep to see the resident tigers. It was absolutely delicious and right for that moment. 

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? 

I love having breakfast out, but it rarely happens - everyone gets up at different times and has different things to do. But all things being equal, I’d head down the road to the Tudor Tea Rooms, where they do a perfect fry up. It’s such a good way to start a Saturday, if I can get away with it.  

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 savoury. 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?

To be completely honest, not really. That’s partly because we don’t necessarily eat breakfast at the same time - if we happen to coincide, I’ll cook something for us both, but most of the time we don’t worry about it. 

I get up so much earlier than everyone else, and I feel like I’d starve if I waited for the boys to be ready. They’re barely functional in the mornings anyway, whereas I’m a ray of sunshine (kind of). We eat dinner together every night, but breakfast would be an unrealistic expectation. 

Do you ever work and eat breakfast simultaneously?

Never! I am a strong believer in stopping for meals, not least because I’ve destroyed too many laptops with spilt coffee and biscuit crumbs. 

I generally sit down and eat my own breakfast once everyone has gone out for the day. I like to read the news and do Wordle on my phone while I’m eating, and sometimes this means it’s a long time before I head to my desk. But I get there eventually.

I really think we need to get back our culture of breaks. It would give everyone space to think. 

I could not possibly agree more. Thank you, Katherine, and thank you for having breakfast at my table back in 2022. Let’s do it again soon; I’ll even bring the Marmite.

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Masala Omelette

Katherine’s masala omelette, drizzled with tamarind sauce

When Katherine very kindly offered her recipe for this Masala Omelette, I was thrilled. Here’s what she said:

I’m not a very weights-and-measures kind of a cook, so this is fairly improvisational - I tend to use up whatever I have in the fridge. You can cook it with from scraps

The key to a good masala omelette is not to overdo the vegetable content. It should have a few sparse and tiny bits of flavouring but remain mostly egg. Resist the temptation to make it ‘more healthy’ by adding more. It’ll ruin the whole thing. 

For one serving, you will need:

¼ onion or 2 spring onions

½ inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled

1 chilli

Maybe also: a few coriander leaves, ½ a deseeded tomato

A little oil for frying

Salt

1 large egg, beaten

Tamarind sauce, ketchup or chutney

2 slices of sourdough bread or a crusty roll

Butter

Chop up whatever vegetables you’re using into very small pieces. Whether or not you de-seed the chilli is your choice. Fry them in a little oil in a hot skillet, with a sprinkling of salt.

Meanwhile, lightly toast and butter your bread. 

When they begin to brown, add your beaten egg, and rotate the pan so that it’s spread evenly in a thin layer. Fry until it turns opaque - no need to turn it over. Fold it up in the pan and then make it into a sandwich with a shake of tamarind sauce.