I've known several people through the years who don't eat breakfast.
In fact, I have known a few who don't eat lunch either, and they may only eat a big evening meal, one meal for the whole day. Between meals they may sip coffee or sodas. I don't think that could have worked for us as we grew up on the farm in the 1940s and 1950s. My folks believed in three square meals a day, and our day always began with a big farm breakfast.
My Mom, who was pretty much a doctor of food, saw breakfast as a solid start for the day. By doctor of food, I mean that Mom was always thinking in terms of how to keep us fueled up and made strong by the food we ate, and if we had something wrong with us she usually had a food prescription to help straighten out our health. Mom had come from a time when springtime was customarily purge time for the kids. In other words, when she was growing up, springtime was a time for flushing out your system and taking some "healthy supplements."
In her day, healthy supplements meant doses of castor oil, cod liver oil, Black Draught and stuff like that. Apparently the worse it tasted, the better it was supposed to be for you. Thankfully, her experience with castor oil led her to resolve not to do that to her kids. So we Nichols kids were spared the Black Draught and the castor oil. But, somehow cod liver oil slipped by her merciful resolve, and every now and then it was cod liver oil time for us. It was pretty bad tasting, but I was told that the castor oil was far worse. That was supposed to make the cod liver oil not so bad after all. Anyway, Mom really believed in breakfast. She would never send us off to school or to the hay field without a good breakfast, a good stick-to-your-ribs kind of breakfast.
One of our Bentonville restaurants on the downtown square advertises that they serve a traditional breakfast. That seems to include two or three eggs, three or four slices of bacon, hash browns, biscuits and gravy, coffee and maybe toast and jelly. I guess that pretty much is a traditional breakfast, but it is not quite the farm breakfast that I remember on the Nichols farm. For us, anything made of potatoes was not a breakfast food. Potatoes of any kind were for dinner or for supper, not breakfast. But the so-called traditional breakfast of today does bear resemblances to the farm breakfast of years ago.
First, though, a person needs to remember the purpose of eating breakfast. On the farm, you don't eat breakfast because you wake up hungry -- you eat breakfast so you won't wear out before dinner. By the way, on the farm, dinner is the noon meal, and the evening meal is supper. Some people get that confused. I used to hear that people in the big cities would eat their dinner at night. That seemed weird, I didn't understand it at all. Anyway, just as you wouldn't starve your horses before taking them to the field to plow, or just as you wouldn't take your tractor to the field without filling the fuel tank, you wouldn't go out to do farm work without eating for energy to work with.
The day on our farm began about 5 o'clock in the morning. I would go out to bring the cows into the barn for milking, and then I usually had four cows to milk. After milking, we would break for breakfast, which was usually ready about 6 in the morning. We sometimes had to hurry breakfast a bit, because the school bus would be coming by soon after 7. We usually began breakfast with Post Toasties Corn Flakes, or Quaker Oats, or Kelloggs Raisin Bran, or Wheat Puffs, or Shredded Wheat. Later on, we sometimes persuaded Dad and Mom to buy Wheaties, the Breakfast of Champions. Wheaties was supposed to make us great baseball players and basketball players.
Then would come eggs and bacon or eggs and sausage. Mom nearly always fried our eggs "over hard." Now and then we might have scrambled eggs, and once in a great while we would have boiled eggs. Along with all that would be biscuits and white gravy. If we didn't have biscuits, we might have toast, ordinary light bread toasted in the oven with butter on it. I don't recall our ever having an electric pop-up toaster. On biscuit days, we might also have syrup, Karo Syrup or maple syrup, or even sorghum molasses. We would mix cow butter into the syrup and sop it up with the biscuit. During World War II, when sugar was scarce and rationed, Karo Syrup was a really good substitute sweetener. You could sweeten your oatmeal with syrup or honey, and you could even use Karo syrup to make cakes or pies. Even today, Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants still maintain something of that tradition by offering honey sauce for your biscuits to go with your fried chicken.
When I was very young, I didn't really like the yellow of an egg. I would separate the white from the yellow and eat only the white. I guess in some households I might not have gotten by with that. I later came to like all the egg, but I have always wanted it cooked until the yellow is not runny. Later on I would hear people ordering eggs "over easy" or "sunny side up." Not me, I always ask for my eggs cooked "over well" or "over hard!" So often, in a cafe, the waitress will bring out the eggs and ask me if my eggs are overcooked. Well, you have very little chance of overcooking my egg. I want you to break the yolk if necessary and cook it until everything is solid.
At home on the farm, we also sometimes had bananas or peaches or oranges for breakfast. Then, one of my own specialties every day was cornbread and milk mush. I always had a glass of milk for breakfast. I would drink about two-thirds of the glass of milk, then chunk a piece of cornbread into the remaining milk and eat the mush with a spoon. It wasn't quite like ice cream, but it was pretty close -- very good! Even in the hard times of the War, we ate well. Sometimes we had special treats for breakfast, like cinnamon toast, toasted with sugar and butter on it. Yum!
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Editor's note: Jerry Nichols may be contacted by email at [email protected] or by phone at 479-621-1621.
Editorial on 04/20/2016