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Jeff's Breakfast Favorites
Ahhh, breakfast. It's not just for breakfast anymore. I love breakfast at any time of the day — there's something about breakfast foods that I just love, and I've never been able to explain it better than that. You've probably seen from the other food projects that the Irish is one of my favorites. But there is so much more. This is the rest of it: shrimp and grits in Charleston and New Orleans, S.O.S. on everything I can put it on, johnny cake the way I actually eat it, a French toast project I'm still arguing with — and breakfast from every country I've been lucky enough to wake up in, from Mexico to Mogadishu. Where I first ate them, and how I make them.
Ahhh, Breakfast Why I eat it at any hour — and the history. "Dinner" literally means "break the fast," so breakfast for dinner is a tautology. And "the most important meal of the day" turns out to be a joke from an 1878 newspaper. Explore →
Shrimp and Grits Charleston and New Orleans — and the printed record says eating it in both isn’t the contradiction I thought. It’s Gullah Geechee, the 1930 original is four ingredients, and the cream-gravy version everyone thinks is old was invented in the 1990s. Explore →
S.O.S. — The Whole Investigation On grits, on cheese grits, on fried grit cakes — plus the polenta comparison I still owe you and the bacon-fat roux question, answered. The Army wrote it down twice and the two don’t match. Explore →
Cornmeal Johnny cake the way I actually eat it — hot squares in a bowl, sugar sprinkled, milk poured over — which I’ve never seen written down. Plus fried mush, and why "journey cake" is debunked by its own dates. Explore →
Tomato Toast & My Great-Grandmother’s Table Toast in a bowl under hot canned tomatoes, parmesan and pepper — my Seventh-day Adventist great-grandmother’s dish, which turns out to be printed verbatim in the 1892 Battle Creek cookbook, right above her cornbread. Plus the honest version of a family Native-ancestry story. Explore →
French Toast: The Open Project Sourdough or not? Glaze or not? Stale overnight or not? Milk, PET milk or cream? And how thick should the syrup be? Real answers to all of it — including the one where I was wrong, and the number that comes from maple. Explore →
The Old Hamlin The Ludington, Michigan diner where I started working in 1980 and first made French toast on bread baked that morning in the apartment upstairs. The Papadakos family story, the Greek-diner pattern behind it, and why a lumber town’s restaurant still bakes its own bread. Explore →
New Orleans Beignets and crêpes. They weren’t called beignets until a 1958 rebrand — they were "French Market doughnuts" — and the famous 1862 date traces only to the company’s own account. Explore →
Mexico, Guatemala & Panama Eggs and chorizo, hojaldras, the desayuno chapín. Mexican chorizo is raw and Spanish is cured — not substitutable. The breakfast burrito is American. And Guatemala exports its best coffee and drinks instant. Explore →
Jamaica, Barbados & Key West Plantains, "bread and two," café con leche. Bligh took ackee OUT of Jamaica, not in. And café cubano couldn’t have "spread with espresso machines in the early 1800s" — they didn’t exist yet. Explore →
Venezuela & Uruguay Arepas with perico, cachapas, the chivito. Masarepa is not masa harina — one is precooked, one is nixtamalized, and swapping them fails. The man who patented the flour died the year before it launched. Explore →
Alaska Reindeer sausage, seafood, wild berries. Reindeer and caribou are the same animal — it’s reindeer on the menu because wild caribou can’t legally be sold, and the herds arrived in 1892. Explore →
Japan & China Nikuman and jianbing. The steamed bun is a Chinese import that Nakamuraya popularized but didn’t invent — Kobe was selling them twelve years earlier. And the jianbing origin legend is folklore. Explore →
Vietnam Phở bò, bánh mì and cơm tấm — all three genuinely breakfast, whatever you think of pho. The origin of pho is a real scholarly dispute and I’m not going to pretend to settle it. Explore →
Kuwait, Dubai & Qatar Balaleet, regag with Oman chips, karak. Gulf breakfast is regional rather than national, and the real story is South Asian migration — the evaporated milk in your karak is a fossilized logistics constraint. Explore →
Amsterdam, Sweden & St Petersburg Stroopwafel, poffertjes, syrniki and pyshki. The stroopwafel origin story is chronologically impossible, the Swedish ones aren’t really breakfast, and the Pyshechnaya has been open since 1958. Explore →
Somalia & South Africa Canjeero, sambuus, sabaayad, baasto — and kota, bunny chow, vetkoek. Two kinds of arrival: a thousand years of Indian Ocean trade, and Italian colonialism. (Don’t ask why I’ve been to Mogadishu.) Explore →
All the Recipes Every recipe from this section — the S.O.S. variants, the grit cakes, my johnny cake, the French toast project, and the whole world tour. Explore →
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