Breakfast New Orleans Style
By John DeMers and Rhonda Findley
Few New Orleans meals have resisted the modern tendency to scale down and speed up quite the way breakfast has. Sure, there are those who consider a bran muffin breakfast -- or, at the other end of the scale, opt for something handed through a window and starting with the prefix "Mc." Learn more about breakfast New Orleans style in this article from New Orleans Gourmet!
Breakfast is full of variety
All the same, the tradition of extravagance and pleasure is just too strong here. If the week is too frazzling for a true morning repaste, that's okay. It just builds up the desire for something special on weekends.
Enjoyed out or cooked in, breakfast is a meal that has more variety than it's usually given credit for; and at least some of the credit that's given belongs to New Orleans.
All the same, the tradition of extravagance and pleasure is just too strong here. If the week is too frazzling for a true morning repaste, that's okay. It just builds up the desire for something special on weekends.
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The story is familiar by now: how the butchers who worked in the French Market in the early 1800s started their days long before dawn, being ravenous by quitting time around 11 am. Thus evolved the "second breakfast" served about that time by market restaurants like Madame Begue's: full-scale feasts of seafood and meats, all washed down by bottles of Bordeaux. The better aspects of breakfast and happy hour came together for these butchers.
Second breakfast was remembered around New Orleans even after its specific roots in the French Market had been forgotten. Madame Begue's evolved into Tujague's, with the set-menus of quitting times becoming the famed table d'hote dinners. Later still, when Owen Brennan was searching for something to set his restaurant apart from its many Creole competitors, second breakfast provided the inspiration for Breakfast at Brennan's.
The idea that a full meal blending breakfast and dinner dishes, almost always with some variation on cocktails, champagne or wine, enjoys its clearest links to the excesses of butchers who were finished for the day. There are no statistics available on how many tourists, after Breakfast at Brennan's, are finished for the day as well.
Breakfast is a good time for meetings
In general, breakfast is in a period of ascendancy. The number of breakfast meetings has noticeably increased, offering business types the opportunity to extend their day. A few years ago, there was even the notion of a "power breakfast," which was pretty much a "power lunch" with coffee where the martinis used to be.
At least one reason why breakfast enjoys regular bouts of popularity is that it has several factors going for it. A few years back, a writer named Elizabeth Alston produced a whole cookbook called Breakfast With Friends. Though she included a menu for "Mardi Gras" brunch (grillades, garlic cheese grits and casserole eggs Sardou), the book's menus cover bases that should keep both world cuisines and breakfasters pretty happy.
According to Alston, breakfast is the time when everyone is most relaxed -- she does admit to being a morning person. People tend to be grateful when served a good hot breakfast, since they're probably accustomed to cold cereal. Breakfast involves, nearly always, casual dress, and it doesn't require wine or spirits. Unless you want them, of course -- Bloody Marys, Brandy Alexanders and Mimosas were invented for a reason.
The history of breakfast
And breakfast is a chance to weave children into the mix with more than the usual ease. After all, once breakfast is finished, the whole day is still ahead of you. Obviously, for most people, breakfast takes its identity from being the first meal of the day. Meaning "to break one fast," it seemed well suited to the local temperament that insisted on Carnival to launch the austerity of Lent.
In many instances traditionally, it truly was breaking a fast, in that it was enjoyed here only after morning Mass. Religion and growing sunlight, it seems, can prove powerful appetizers. Yet for all its quirkiness, breakfast in New Orleans does fit into the larger picture drawn from Americana. Native Americans, for instance, started their days with cornmeal mush and perhaps cornbread, a tradition they taught to the earliest English colonists. Cornmeal met molasses for a quick porridge, rather colorfully dubbed "hasty pudding."
Moving into the 19th century, variety became a particular goal, fueling the addition not only of side items like jellies and jams, coffees and teas, but more substantial foods like fish and meat. Rum in the form of a hot toddy was commonplace in most parts of the country, though it never threatened the popularity of fine Bordeaux in Creole New Orleans and at sugar plantations along the Mississippi River.
One of the pleasures of travel, even today, is passing from one breakfast zone to another: moving from our Deep South biscuits, for instance, into the world of universal toast. Happily, cities with large Jewish populations tend to serve bagels, which is a step up.
Even more dramatically, there is the evolution from grits to hash browns as you move toward the north. Strictly speaking, I guess I should live right on the border and enjoy both every morning. Unquestionably, the appreciation we feel for a good, substantial, even stylish breakfast is related to the fact that we get some so seldom. Following on the heals of cold cereal (usually high in sugar, surprisingly high in salt), we've seen not only fast-food combinations wrapped in paper but a wide variety of items that go from the freezer to the microwave to our waiting mouths.
Is it any wonder then that when business or pleasure takes us to breakfast, when child or spouse fixes us breakfast, or when carousing keeps us out until it's time for breakfast, we're ready for something not just filling but a little wonderful?
In these moments, which tend to be rare, we realize that breaking one's fast is not about eating but about rejoicing. And even those who aren't morning people can usually stand a bit of that.
Grillades and Grits
Ingredients:
2 pounds beef or veal round, 1/2 inch thick
3 Tablespoons vegetable oil
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Flour
1 large onion, thinly sliced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 small green pepper, finely chopped
1 cup chopped tomatoes
1 Tablespoon parsley
1/8 teaspoon dried thyme
1 1/2 cups water
Tabasco brand pepper sauce to taste
3 cups hot cooked grits
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Directions:
Cut the meat into 3-inch squares. Season with salt and pepper, then dredge in the flour and shake off excess. Heat 2 Tablespoons of the cooking oil in a heavy skillet, brown the meat lightly and drain on absorbent paper.
Make roux in the skillet with 2 tablespoons of flour and the remaining oil, browning until it's a rich dark color. Add all other ingredients (except the grits) to the roux and simmer until the mixture thickens, about 15 minutes.
Return the meat to the pan, cover the skillet and cook until tender, about 1 hour. Stir often. Serve the grillades and sauce with hot grits. Serves 6.
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About this article: This article originally appeared in New Orleans Gourmet Magazine.
