A “Homesick Café” *

I’m hungry this morning. I’ve been thinking of what I’d really like most—to eat out in the way we could, say, fifty years ago.

It’s a café, not too big. The floor is retro linoleum, pale green and white. On the windows are café curtains, also white.

And here’s what they offer for breakfast, along with fresh squeezed orange juice and GOOD coffee.

First, pancakes, thinner than what you usually get and made from scratch. They won’t have that slightly bitter preservative taste most pancakes have lately. You won’t notice sugar in the pancakes because you’re going to put syrup on them. Cane or maple, the real thing.

And butter. Hard to find good butter. Most butter is okay, but when you taste better butter, you know it. The best I’ve tasted was a ridiculously expensive French butter before the pandemic. No longer imported.

But American cows can do that quality, too. Maybe find a dairy nearby where they make their own. Buy plenty, you’re going to need it.

Because those pancakes require eggs, fresh farm eggs from free ranging chickens, soft fried in butter with the delicate white and runny yolk. (I’ll tell you how I do it in a minute.)

Eggs like that need their own place on the menu. And they deserve thin, crisp bacon or fresh pan sausage. If you’re not having pancakes, soft scramble those eggs in drippings, serve them with grits, made in a double boiler, long and slow, but you’ll need butter, too, on those grits, even with the bacon or sausage.

Or try Fraser’s Eggs, my father’s “invention.” Skillet toast with cheddar cheese, so the cheese melts. And topped with one or two of those soft fried eggs.

It’s a versatile dish, takes well to bacon or sausage or those eggs, scrambled.

And that brings me to the most important part of the breakfast menu. Biscuits.

People will go a long way for a good biscuit. They used to find a tasty almost sourdough version in Round Top at Scotty’s. I don’t know her kitchen’s secret, but I do know I haven’t eaten a good biscuit in Texas cafés since.

One reason is you can’t hold biscuits on a steam table, or any other way I’ve seen. The moment they come out of the oven they begin to degrade. So it’s oven to table to stomach, as quickly as possible—stopping only for a generous slathering in butter and maybe some jam—strawberry or red plum jelly.

Or cream gravy. Okay, fighting words probably: but there’s only one way to make good cream gravy.

You need drippings, bacon or sausage, but sausage is best. Stir them up with some flour and for your liquid use Carnation Evaporated Milk. I’m not kidding.

West Texans in the early 20th century might not have understood how good a rare steak can be, but they knew their pan gravy.

Pour it over anything but pancakes. About those soft fried eggs I mentioned: Melt that good butter in a skillet to a little sizzle, not too hot though. Slide your fresh eggs into it, add a splash of water, and cover it. Not for long.

This is a fry-poach process and it produces the tenderest whites, along with a beautifully runny yolk.

Those grits, and even those pancakes, are hungry for yolks like that, and you will be, too.

* (“Dinner at the Homesick Café” is a fine novel by Anne Tyler. Look for it.)

Readers can contact Hale at bfhale2017@gmail.com Her new book, This Familiar Heart, is available at the Fayette County Record office and bookstores, on and offline, everywhere.