The man in the street: Papers on American topics

by Meredith Nicholson

Great numbers of American households are dominated by that marvel of the age, the Sunday newspaper. For this prodigious expression of journalistic enterprise I have only the warmest admiration, but I should certainly exclude it from the breakfast table as provocative of discord and subversive of discipline. Amusing as the “funny page” may be, its color scheme does not blend well either with soft-boiled eggs or marmalade. Madeline’s appetite for news of the social world may wait a little, and as there is no possibility of buying or selling on the Sabbath-day, the gentleman at the head of the table may as well curb his curiosity about the conclusions of the weekly market review. Fragments of Sunday newspapers scattered about a breakfast table are not decorative. They encourage bad manners and selfishness. A newspaper is an impudent intrusion at the table at any time, but on Sunday its presence is a crime. On an occasion, the late William Graham Sumner was a guest in my house. Like the alert, clear-thinking philosopher he was, he rose early and read the morning paper before breakfast. He read it standing, and finding him erect by a window with the journal spread wide for greater ease in scanning it quickly, I begged him to be seated. “No,” he answered; “always read a newspaper standing; you won’t waste time on it that way.”

With equal firmness I should exclude the morning mail from the table. The arrival of the post is in itself an infringement upon domestic privacy, and the reading of letters is deadly to that conversation which alone can make the table tolerable at any meal. Good news can wait; bad news is better delayed until the mind and body are primed to deal with it. If the son has been “canned” at school, or if the daughter has overstepped her allowance, or if some absent member of the family is ill, nothing can be done about it at the breakfast table. On the first day of the month, the dumping of bills on the table, to the accompaniment of expostulations, regrets, and perhaps tears, should be forbidden. Few homes are so controlled by affection and generous impulses as to make possible the distribution of bills at a breakfast table without poisoning the day. A tradesman with the slightest feeling of delicacy will never mail a bill to be delivered on the morning of the first day of the month. Anywhere from the third or fourth to the twentieth, and so timed as to be delivered in the afternoon—such would be my suggestion to the worthy merchant. The head of the house knows, at dinner time, the worst that the day has for him; if fortune has smiled, he is likely to be merciful; if fate has thrown the dice against him, he will be humble. And besides, a discreet wife, receiving an account that has hung over her head ever since she made that sad, rash purchase, has, if the bill arrive in the afternoon post, a chance to conceal the odious thing until such time as the domestic atmosphere is clear and bright. Attempts to sneak the dressmaker’s bill under the coffee-pot are fraught with peril; such concealments are unworthy of American womanhood. Let the hour or half-hour at the breakfast table be kept free of the taint of bargain and sale, a quiet vestibule of the day, barred against importunate creditors.

As against the tendency, so destructive of good health and mental and moral efficiency, to slight breakfast, the food manufacturers have set themselves with praiseworthy determination to preserve and dignify the meal. One has but to peruse the advertising pages of the periodicals to learn of the many tempting preparations that are offered to grace the breakfast table. The obtuse, inured to hasty snatches, nibbles, and sips, are assisted to a proper appreciation of these preparations by the most enchanting illustrations. The art of publicity has spent itself lavishly to lure the world to an orderly and contemplative breakfast with an infinite variety of cereals that have been subjected to processes which make them a boon to mankind. When I hear of an addition to the long list, I fly at once to the grocer to obtain one of the crisp packages, and hurry home to deposit it with the cook for early experiment. The adventurous sense is roused not only by the seductive advertisement but by the neatness of the container, the ears of corn or the wheat sheaf so vividly depicted on the wrapper, or the contagious smile of a radiant child brandishing a spoon and demanding more.

Only a slouchy and unimaginative housewife will repeat monotonously a breakfast schedule. A wise rotation, a continual surprise in the food offered, does much to brighten the table. The damnable iteration of ham and eggs has cracked the pillars of many a happy home. There should be no ground for cavil; the various items should not only be well-chosen, but each dish should be fashioned as for a feast of high ceremony. Gluttony is a grievous sin; breakfast, I repeat, should be a spiritual repast. If fruit is all that the soul craves, well enough; but let it be of paradisiacal perfection. If coffee and a roll satisfy the stomach’s craving, let the one be clear and not so bitter as to keep the imbiber’s heart protesting all day, and the other hot enough to melt butter and of ethereal lightness. The egg is the most sinned against of all foods. It would seem that no one could or would wantonly ruin an egg, a thing so useful, so inoffensive; and yet the proper cooking of an egg is one of the most difficult of all culinary arts. Millions of eggs are ruined every year in American kitchens. Better that the whole annual output should be cast into the sea than that one egg should offend the eye and the palate of the expectant breakfaster.

It grieves me to be obliged to confess that in hotels and on dining-cars, particularly west of Pittsburgh, many of my fellow citizens are weak before the temptation of hot cakes, drenched in syrup. I have visited homes where the griddle is an implement frequently invoked through the winter months, and I have at times, in my own house, met the buckwheat cake and the syrup jug and meekly fallen before their combined assault; but the sight of a man eating hot cakes on a flying train, after a night in a sleeper, fills me with a sense of desolation. Verily it is not alone the drama that the tired business man has brought to low estate!

Sausage and buckwheat cakes have never appealed to me as an inevitable combination like ham and eggs. Beefsteak and onions at the breakfast hour are only for those who expect to devote the remainder of the day to crime or wood-chopping. The scent in itself is not the incense for rosy-fingered morn; and steak at breakfast, particularly in these times of perpendicular prices, speaks for vulgar display rather than generosity.

The history of breakfast, the many forms that it has known, the customs of various tribes and nations, assist little in any attempt to re-establish the meal in public confidence. Plato may have done his loftiest thinking on an empty stomach; I incline to the belief that Sophocles was at all times a light breakfaster; Horace must regret that he passed into the Elysian Fields without knowing the refreshing qualities of a grapefruit. If my post-mortem terminal were less problematical, I should like to carry him a grapefruit—a specimen not chilled to death in cold storage—and divide it with him, perhaps adding a splash of Falernian for memory’s sake. But the habits of the good and great of olden times are not of the slightest importance to us of twentieth-century America. Still, not to ignore wholly the familiar literary associations suggested by my subject, Samuel Rogers and his weakness for entertaining at breakfast shall have honorable mention. Rogers’s breakfasts, one of his contemporaries hinted, were a cunning test of the fitness of the guests to be promoted to the host’s dinner table—a process I should have reversed, on the theory that the qualifications for breakfast guests are far more exacting than those for a dinner company. We have testimony that Rogers’s breakfasts, informal and with every one at ease, were much more successful than his dinners. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and Moore, Southey and Macaulay, the Duke of Wellington and Lord John Russell were fellows to make a lively breakfast table. At one of these functions Coleridge talked for three hours on poetry, an occasion on which, we may assume, the variety or quality of the food didn’t matter greatly.

Breakfast as a social medium has never flourished in America, chiefly because of our lack of leisure. Where recognized at all it is thrown into the middle of the day where it becomes an anomaly, an impudent intrusion. A breakfast that is a luncheon is not a breakfast, but a concession to the Philistines. Once, with considerable difficulty, I persuaded a lady of my acquaintance to undertake to popularize breakfast by asking a company, few and fit, for eight o’clock. The first party was delightful, and the second, moved along to nine, was equally successful. But the hostess was so pleased with her success that she increased the number of guests to a dozen and then to fifteen, and advanced the hour to noon, with the result that the felicity of the earlier hours was lost. One must have a concrete programme to be of service in these reforms, and I shall say quite fearlessly that a round table set for six is the ideal arrangement.

A breakfast must be planned with greatest care. It should never be resorted to as a means of paying social debts, but arranged with the utmost independence. Where a wife is a desirable guest and the husband is not, there is no reason why a plate should be wasted. On the other hand, I should as rigidly exclude the wife who is socially a non-conductor. The talk at a breakfast table must be spirited, and it will not be otherwise if the company is well chosen. It’s an absurd idea that candle-light is essential to sociability and that wit will not sparkle in the early morning. Some of the best talk I ever listened to has been at breakfast tables, where the guests conversed freely under the inspiration of a mounting sun. Doctor Holmes clearly believed the breakfast hour appropriate for the disclosure of the sprightliest philosophy.

An American novelist once explained that he did his writing in the afternoon because he couldn’t make love in the morning. Not make love in the morning! The thought is barbarous. Morning is of sentiment all compact. Morning to the lover who possesses a soul is washed with Olympian dews. The world is all before him where to choose and his heart is his only guide. Love is not love that fears the morning light.... There was a house by the sea, whence a girl used to dart forth every morning for a run over the rocks. We used to watch her from our windows, admiring the lightness of her step, her unconscious grace as she was silhouetted on some high point of the shore against the blue of sea and sky. It was to think of him, her lover, in the free sanctuary of the new, clean day that she ran that morning race with her own spirits. And he, perhaps knowing that she was thus preparing herself for their first meeting, would fly after her, and they would come running back, hand in hand, and appear with glowing cheeks and shining eyes at the breakfast table, to communicate to the rest of us the joy of youth.