The Breakfast Book by Andrew Dalby

Author:Andrew Dalby
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Reaktion Books

The Traveller’s Breakfast

As we have seen, breakfasts may show extreme variety across a community and in neighbouring communities. This is why, before the advent of international hotels, the breakfasts of any long-distance traveller are likely to have been completely different every day.

Hence the breakfast that Edward Spencer Mott enjoyed in the late nineteenth century in Malta, and considered to be ‘a bona-fide Mediterranean breakfast’, consisting as it did ‘principally of red mullet and strawberries’, might not be the breakfast that another traveller would have found there the following day.

Hence the breakfasts that Fanny Erskine, known after her marriage to a Spanish diplomat as Frances Calderón de la Barca, enjoyed during her visit to Mexico in the early 1840s seem from her descriptions to have been different almost every day as she and her husband travelled further off the beaten track. She justifies, incidentally, Conan Doyle’s belief that ‘Scotchwomen’ have a good idea of breakfast: she writes about her breakfasts frequently and with well-judged praise. She clearly shows how Spanish breakfasts had been transformed in their New World environment and at the same time how travellers must adapt to their surroundings. At Jalapa (Xalapa-Enríquez), where we had better begin, ‘our breakfast was delicious’, she reports. ‘Such fresh eggs, and fresh butter, and good coffee and well-fried chickens; moreover such good bread and peculiarly excellent water, that we fell very much in love with Jalapa.’ So far, so ordinary: only the chicken would seem unusual at an English or Scottish breakfast, and even that might have been allowed as a variant where pork or beef were normal. Breakfast surprises commenced, not many days later, at La Ventilla, where Madame Calderón de la Barca and her husband were given ‘a tolerable breakfast, hunger making chile and garlic supportable’. But she could not yet bring herself to drink pulque. If nectar was imbibed by the gods of Olympus, pulque, she decided, must be the beverage of Pluto in Hades. At the monastery of Tacuba they were served with ‘a very nice breakfast, simple, but good; fish from the lake, different preparations of eggs, rizau-lait, coffee and fruit’. A little further on, near Naucalpan, they visited the famous shrine of the Virgen de los Remedios, found an excellent breakfast prepared, ‘and here, for the first time, I conceived the possibility of not disliking pulque’. But the most varied single breakfast in the whole memoir comes after these, when she was good and ready for it. This is the one to which she was invited after visiting a shrine at Santiago in central Mexico:

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