Friday, December 26, 2008

A Jack Kerouac breakfast

I just made pancakes for Crystal and me with real Maine maple syrup ($25 per quart!) and it got me thinking about Jack's description in "Railroad Earth" of Lonesome Traveler (1960) about making his breakfast in the tiny San Francisco flophouse room he rented when he was a brakeman on the Southern Pacific:

...make my raisin toast by sitting it on a little wire I'd especially bent to place over the hotplate, the toast crackled up, there, I spread the margarine on the still red hot toast and it too would crackle and sink in golden, among burnt raisins and this was my toast.-- Then two eggs gently slowly fried in soft margarine in my little skidrow frying pan about half as thick as a dime in fact less, a little piece of tiny tin you could bring on a camp trip -- the eggs slowly fluffled in there and swelled from butter steams and I threw garlic salt on them, and when they were ready the yellow of them had been slightly filmed with a cooked white at the top from the tin cover I'd put over the frying pan, so now they were ready, and out they came, I spread them out on top of my already prepared potatoes which had been boiled in small pieces and then mixed with the bacon I'd already fried in small pieces, kind of raggely mashed bacon potatoes, with eggs on top steaming, and on the side lettuce, with peanut butter dab nearby on side (p. 48).


Makes you wanna go cook breakfast, doesn't it?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Actually...no. ick.

swan said...

ahhh marvelous, thank you just what i needed!