If you’re the sort of person who gravitates toward diners, whose favorite restaurants serve breakfast all day, who makes breakfast for dinner at home and whose idea of a good time is making frosted flakes from scratch, then here’s a cookbook for you. Big Bad Breakfast (Ten Speed Press, $30) is the new book from John Currence, and it’s a big, bad book of a cookbook, as was clearly the author’s intent.
Currence is pretty big and bad himself, if you want to push the conceit: he won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: South in 2009, has appeared on No Reservations and Top Chef Masters, has a string of restaurants in Oxford, Miss. — including one called Big Bad Breakfast — and has written for the magazine Garden and Gun.
Big Bad Breakfast is Currence’s second book, after his debut Pickles, Pigs & Whiskey, and it is a happily irreverent ode to the meal. There are forewords by John Besh and David Chang (imprimatur for the irreverence genre), a funny introduction in which we are given the 10 Commandments of Breakfast, and then 75 fun recipes for all the omelets and hoecakes and scrambles and enchiladas and biscuits and gravy that you could hope for.
Ed Anderson’s hunger-inducing photography includes repeating plates of pancakes, lots of cast-iron skillets and eggs in various compositions, pouring coffee, Elvis Presley tapestries, biscuit step-by-steps, shots of a baseball-capped Currence at work in the kitchen or bellied up to a crowded counter. Flip through all this, read the chatty anecdotes (in praise of MSG, the emu egg in the parking lot), and the handy tips from someone who has worked in many kitchens, other people’s and his own, and you get a growing sense of comfort — and that’s not just because many of the recipes are for comfort food.
Unsurprisingly, the book concludes with a cocktail chapter. “There is little in the world that’s more fun than day drinking,” Currence writes. “If you take offense to this particular theory, well, we have very little to talk about.”
The point, of course, is that there is much to talk about — and much to cook, preferably for breakfast.