It is 7:00am. The pan hisses and spits. Grease leaps from the metal and singes my skin as the rashers fill the kitchen with a familiar smell. I did not eat dinner last night, and my stomach voices its discontent loudly. The fat bubbles, shrivels, and melts away until the pork reaches the perfect consistency: cooked through, yet still chewy. I remove the bacon from the stove and crack two eggs over the hot grease. The pan has a tendency to turn violent at this stage so I lower the heat, raising it again once the eggs are calmly simmering. I always take my eggs over medium: fluffy but not dry, slightly runny but not too delicate. Most of all, I like my eggs fried in bacon grease. For me, my bacon and eggs make a perfect breakfast when paired with a grapefruit, black coffee, and water. It is satisfying, energizing, and provides some generous seasoning for my cast iron cookware. The crisp tartness of the grapefruit helps to cut through the greasy, fatty, richness of the bacon, while the eggs help nullify the saltiness. The bitter coffee offsets the sour aftertaste that the grapefruit leaves behind, and a healthy swig of water washes down the last of the coffee when breakfast is done. Alongside a pancake or waffle, hash browns, sausage links, and orange juice these foods come together to form the “American Breakfast” commonly served in hotels the world over.

Breakfast has always been my favorite meal of the day. Regardless of whether the meal in question consists of a savory omelet, sweet crepes, or even a guilty bowl of colorful cereal, I always look forward to breakfast food. The “American” breakfast, however, is special. Compared to its English and Continental counterparts, the American breakfast has a certain, satisfying “oomph” to it. As my mouth waters and I go on about how much I enjoy the taste of bacon, I feel it is worth mentioning that I am, for the most part, vegetarian. My typical breakfast now consists of two eggs and some fruit. However, that is much less compelling to write about and is far less personally significant to me. As strange a sentence as this is for me to write, bacon and eggs hold a special place in my heart, and together they are my favorite food.

One reason why that feels like an odd statement to make is my upbringing. Ethnically, half of my family is Indian and the other is Vietnamese, two countries which are renowned for their food. I grew up eating cultural dishes from both sides of my family, and even gained my own passion for cooking thanks to my grandparents. I always look forward to my relatives’ cooking when I visit home. However, when I started living on my own, I didn’t have access to the resources or the drive to make well-crafted meals all of the time. That, and I started to tire of eating oatmeal every morning. The change in my choice of breakfast was inspired by my roommate of that time. “It’s the best way to make eggs”, he told me as he picked the sizzling strips off of the hot metal, “it lets you turn the heat up higher than you can with oil and gives things a really even cook…and if you’re not making bacon use butter”. I wouldn’t ever need butter, however, as I also learned to leave the bacon grease in the pan, refrigerated, before reusing it the following morning. Although simple, and maybe a little lazy, cooking this one meal every morning made me feel truly independent for the first time.

I continued making that same breakfast for myself for about a year. To my surprise, I never grew sick of it. I attribute this lack of taste exhaustion to the dish’s simplicity. My family has always tended to cook complex, heavily spiced meals that explode with flavor in your mouth, which, while enjoyable in smaller amounts, was oftentimes overwhelming for me. I can be prone to forms of “sensory overload”, and I am of the belief that my food preferences are an offshoot of that susceptibility. When I was young, I was even more sensitive to stimuli, and I see the relationship I had with food at this age as no coincidence. My mother told me that I “always separated [my] food into little groups and got upset when tastes or textures mixed”. “Cooking for you was difficult”, she added. I do vaguely remember this period of my life. I hated sauces, condiments, spices, and even salt. Any heterogeneous foods, like salads, were also off the menu for me. With this in mind, it is little wonder why I would drift away from culinary roots.

Even if I couldn’t stomach my family’s food every day of the week, I do always enjoy cooking with them. It is a bonding experience every time, regardless of whether or not I actually eat the meal we make. After moving away from home, cooking became a way for me to feel more in-touch with my family. When calling a family member to catch up with them, we often talk about what we have cooked recently. Conversations like these would spur me on to experiment more with my food, trying new recipes and making my own, so that I would always have an interesting meal to talk about. Still, the only meal I made consistently was old reliable: bacon and eggs.