Wow. German breakfast…
‘Full English breakfast’ is something I seldom have at home, as it is a rather elaborate restaurant ritual; and besides, although I enjoy it while I’m eating, all those fried meats tend to return and get re-tasted all day.
Modern German breakfast – I don’t know how long this has existed in this form, but it was very familiar to me in Kiel, Darmstadt, Berlin, and in various trips to Switzerland, Hamburg, usw. – is several pieces of really good, warm, bread and rolls, with sliced cheese and meats, butter, and various pastes, and jams and such. Along with, as in this case, a soft-boiled egg, yogurt with nuts in it, very strong tea, orange juice; plus half a tomato (as the vegetable course). The student version, which I remember from my months of sleeping in the Darmstadt university student dorm with Herbert – the gentle, charming Herbert, who liked California police uniforms, and is now a Heilpraktiker in Berlin – has only the primary elements of this breakfast – bread, cheese, pastes, in bottles and on boards scattered across the table.
I know that the sliced cold cuts and little pastes in plastic containers must be the modern devolution of something that probably looked quite different a few decades ago, but I love it this way – the wide and bizarre selection (you can have anything at all on your bread, from Nutella to liver pâté), the richness of each… and, best of all of course, that really good bread. I’m not much for French bread; and I know that English and American bread are pallid imitations of what they so badly recall. But German bread, now that’s real bread…
And I eat it all. Even the tomato.
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