Around The World On Breakfast

When I was a child, breakfast was scrambled eggs with toasted wholemeal bread and reconstituted orange juice. The eggs were cooked until they were hard and dry and the orange juice was always a little on the watery side; my mother hated cooking and loved economizing. My father only had eggs on the weekends. His breakfast was something so hideous I could hardly stand to look at it: a huge bowl full of oats, bran, wheat germ, and dried fruit swimming in soy milk. It looked like something straight out of a trough and was genuinely gag-worthy. By the time I was twelve, I could no longer stomach scrambled eggs and the thought of health food made me bilious. I'd discovered I was a food snob: I liked my orange juice fresh and full strength.

When I first moved away from home, I treated myself to huge, exotic breakfasts: blintzes with blackberry jam and sour cream, huevos rancheros with jalapeno sauce, lightly poached eggs on poppy seed toast, cornmeal muffins with Monterrey jack cheese.

As a student, I didn't have much time for breakfast. Before I left my apartment, I stuffed hard-boiled eggs and apples into my pockets. On weekends, I went to a local diner and had the kind of big, greasy breakfasts my mother never cooked, washed down with enough coffee to keep me awake for three days.

In Japan, I learned that breakfast was often rice, grilled fish, soup, and pickles, washed down by a lot of green tea. I found out that the egg served in a small bowl was actually raw; you mixed it with soy sauce, poured it over the rice, and ate the resulting mixture with nori, compressed seaweed. It took me a year to get used to this, but once I did, I couldn't get enough of it.

In Holland, breakfast was bread, cheese and coffee. The bread was never toasted and none of my Dutch housemates could understand why it should be. Some of them ate peanut butter for breakfast. At first I scorned this, silly me. Peanut butter for breakfast is perfectly delicious and I can heartily recommend it.

When we were first married, my husband liked to occasionally serve the breakfasts he remembered from Sudan: foul, or Egyptian red beans, with unleavened bread, chopped onion, tomato, and goat's cheese, washed down with sweetened black tea. But Egyptian red beans weren't easy to come by in Tokyo and we both had busy jobs that we spent hours commuting to and from. On the weekends, I sometimes made Japanese breakfast. After a while, my husband could eat raw egg over rice too, and we never once got salmonella. When I wanted a western-style treat, I went to a small hotel near my office that served omelettes, toast, fresh fruit, and limitless coffee.

Our first baby was born in Wales. At first, my husband outdid himself making beautiful well-balanced breakfasts: poached eggs, vegetarian sausages, lightly fried tomatoes, wholemeal bread, fresh-squeezed orange juice. Then we moved back to Japan and resumed full-time jobs. Breakfast for our baby was organic brown rice cereal, mashed fruit, and lentil soup. For us it was a banana on the way to the station. On my way to work, I passed the elegant little hotel where I'd once enjoyed my leisurely omelettes and coffee. The thought of my double-income-no-kids self sitting there never failed to amaze me: I felt like a completely different person.

In Scotland, I helped run a small hotel where we cooked and served up to 20 breakfasts a day. I baked my own bread, muffins, and rolls on a daily basis. We offered a full British breakfast: eggs poached, fried, scrambled, or hard-boiled, grilled tomatoes, sauteed mushrooms, sausages, bacon, baked beans, stewed fruit, and fresh fruit salad. I also made oatmeal, Indian-style, boiled with milk, raisins, and spices and served with fresh fruit and cashew nuts. This wasn't popular with our elderly guests: they wanted their oatmeal, which they called porridge, boiled the traditional way with water and salt. One woman asked me to make it the previous night and serve it cold. Watching her eat her salty, stone-cold porridge the next day, I marveled that I could ever have found pickles, grilled fish, and raw egg exotic.

A typical Turkish breakfast consists of white cheese, cucumbers, tomatoes, olives and bread, served with a tulip-shaped glass of sweet black tea. I have this almost every day now, and I can vouch for its tastiness. Some people might think that cucumbers and tomatoes make strange breakfast foods, but it's amazing how refreshing they are in the summer. The olives and salty cheese help replenish all the salt you tend to sweat out, too.

Some years ago, I found the exact same cereal my father used to eat in a health food shop in Tokyo. I bought it for purely nostalgic reasons, but to my amazement it was delicious. I found it in Holland and Scotland too, and I know where they sell it here. It makes a great default breakfast when you run out of other things. And it's handy for houseguests too. I don't put soy milk on it, though. And I still like my orange juice neat.