Around the World, Frying Bread

‘French toast’ or ‘Pain perdue’ (literally, lost bread) is actually not necessarily French. Some resources suggest that if you stretch your ‘defintions’ a bit, practically every country, culture and cuisine has a recipe for stale bread, dipped in egg and re-animated as a breakfasty-brunchy-snack. Here I’ve eaten toasted bread in a Manchurian sauce (horrible), re-fried bread in coriander, tomatoes, chilies and onions in my Sindhi relatives' homes (sail dub roti, they call it) and of course, something the local frier-upper on the road side used to mysteriously call ‘rock and roll’ which was a boiled potato, chutney and ketchup sandwich, dipped in gram-flour batter and deep fried in oil that was at least four times past its best.

The Brits have eggy bread, the Chinese use soy sauce instead of salt and honey instead of sugar, the Portuguese fry theirs up and then sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon, the Slavs eat it with clotted cream or cheese or jam and the Aussies apparently sometimes serve it up with side orders of banana, fried bacon and maple syrup. Really.

I once tried to make French Toast with German Rye bread and it was disgusting but the source of many Euro-cliché jokes all day. The recipe below is ‘Italian’ inspired but in Italy, they actually make a sandwich of mozzarella, then dip it in egg and fresh herbs and fry it up. Our way is simpler and lower-fat.

A Greek Inspired Breakfast

(serves 4 generously)

Ingredients:

400 ml of hung yoghurt *

(1 tub of commercial yoghurt is 400 ml)

2 crisp red or green apples, chopped into 1 cm cubes

Two handfuls of seedless grapes (black or purple are nicer but green is just as good)

The seeds of 1 pomegranate

½ cup of gently toasted walnuts and almonds**

Honey – according to taste

Method:

This is so very pretty - maximize the effect of all the colours and textures while you assemble. Put about 2/3 tablespoons of yoghurt at the bottom of each transparent bowl or even a wine goblet if it’s a ‘fancy’ breakfast. Pile the grapes and apples in. Then another two tablespoons of yoghurt on top with a light touch – it should just sit on top of the fruit. Now sprinkle the pomegranate seeds and the nuts. Drizzle with honey and serve immediately.

If this is part of a social breakfast or brunch then serve all the ingredients separately with the honey in a small earthen milk jug. Guests really enjoy constructing this delightfully healthy start to a lazy brunch or late breakfast.

Now just imagine a lazy blue ocean and a grove of olive trees behind you on the hill.

Breakfast!

I discovered breakfast shamefully late in the day. A child of the seventies, growing up in the Middle East with 5 siblings and parents who were anything but early-birds, if we caught the worm, it would have been our only shot at protein. Breakfast would be a liquefied mass of something – a fruit smoothie, thin porridge with sugar or god forbid, egg-flip – a now unthinkable concoction of raw egg, hot milk and sugar. Then there were the variations of the buttered bread and too sweet tea breakfast (give or take eggs, bacon, jam, peanut butter).

As a young adult, I’ve probably suffered all the breakfast myths and made some up myself. The ‘if you start the day eating you just over-eat the rest of the day too’ theory, as a chubby girl, ravenous at lunch-time, did me no favours and I still have heartburn from the two-sunny-sides up with buttered toast era.

I attempted breakfast as a young married: muesli made me retch (no sugar-less, raisin-free sort then), porridge brought back childhood nightmares (note: you can switch honey or sugar for organic sea salt) and Indian breakfasts required a level of dedication in the kitchen, that I admit, I looked down on typifying Indian woman subjugation. Also, I’ve never trusted the packaged cereal people.

Having children changed all that. Now, the kids, the husband, hungover house-guests on the sofa-bed and weekend morning walkers who ‘pop in for coffee’ all know that we breakfast like champions – any day of the week but especially on weekends.

Not all great breakfasts must be elaborate. There are all sorts of interesting takes on breakfasts – some can even be jimmied up into brunch, make an excellent snack for the kids or be taken to work for a clever, healthy working lunch.

In our Tokyo hostel, we ate hot noodles beaten with raw egg and tofu. In Crete, as the locals drank a challenging black coffee and smoked their cigarillos, we spooned fruit out of creamy Greek yoghurt and in Paris, we ate breakfast for two hours and then walked slowly till lunch.

So, here are a bunch of home-grown but travel-inspired breakfasts to help both cook and consumer start the day without much fuss but with all the power you need to take on the world, even if lunch is delayed.