Stewed pears make an elegant dessert served with whipped cream; but this is too rich for breakfast. Baked pears with cream are sometimes offered, and eggs in every form,—scrambled, dropped, boiled, stuffed, and even boiled hard, sliced and dressed as a salad. "What is so good as an egg salad for a hungry person?" asked a hostess in the Adirondacks who had nothing else to offer! Eggs are the staple for breakfast.
Ham omelet with a little parsley, lamb chops with green peas, tripe à la Bourdelaise, hashed turkey, hashed chicken with cream, and breaded veal with tomato sauce, calf's brains with a black butter, stewed veal à la Chasseur, broiled shad's roe, broiled soft-shell clams, minced tenderloin with Lyonnaise potatoes, blue-fish au gratin, broiled steak with water-cress, picked-up codfish, and smoked beef in cream are of the thousand and one delicacies for the early breakfast,—if one can eat them.
It is better to eat a saucer of oatmeal and cream at nine o'clock, take a cup of tea, and do one's work; then at twelve to sit down to as good a breakfast as possible,—a regular déjeuner à la fourchette. The digestion is then active; the brain after several hours work needs repose, and at one or two o'clock can go to work again like a giant refreshed.
An early breakfast with meat is thought by foreign doctors not to be good for children. But in France they give children wine at a very early age, which is rarely done in this country. At all boarding-schools and hospitals wine is given to young children. Certainly there are fewer drunkards and fewer dyspeptics in France than in America.
Brillat Savarin says of coffee, "It is beyond doubt that coffee acts upon the functions of the brain as an excitant." Voltaire and Buffon drank a great deal of coffee. If it deprives persons of sleep it should never be taken. It is to many a poison; and hospitals are full of men made cripples by the immoderate stimulus of coffee. The Spanish people live and flourish on chocolate; introduced into Spain during the seventeenth century, it crossed the Pyrenees with Anne of Austria, daughter of Philip II. and wife of Louis XIII., and at the commencement of the Regency was more in vogue than coffee.
Many modern writers advise a good cup of chocolate at breakfast as wholesome and easily digested, and it is good for clergymen, lawyers, and travellers. In America it is considered heavy and headachy; and doubtless the climate has something to do with this. Cocoa and the lighter preparations of chocolate are good at sea, and very comforting to those who find their nerves too much on the alert to stand coffee or tea. Every one must consult his own health and taste in this as in all matters.
The boldest attempts to increase the enjoyments of the palate, or to tell people what they shall eat or drink, are constantly overthrown by some subtile enemy in the stomach; and breakfasts should especially be so light that they can tickle the palate without disturbing the brain. A red herring is a good appetizer.
"Meet me at breakfast alone,
And then I will give you a dish
Which really deserves to be known,