It began with a flash of insight like a bolt of lightning in a snowstorm, the kind of insight that can only be induced by high-altitude hypoxia and making breakfast.
“Breakfast is a vector space. You can put pancakes, crepes and scrambled eggs on a simplex where the variables are the ratio between milk, eggs and flour. We have explored very little of this diversity. Many more breakfasts may exist than we know.”
Like all such hypoxia-ed-brain ideas, this one was a successful tweet.
I stood in the kitchen, stunned with indecision. The mixing bowl was in front of me, beside it milk, eggs and flour, all as familiar individually as they had been a moment before, but now the possibilities of their combination were much greater. Breakfast was now an alien fractal infiltrating our world like the lighthouse at the end of Annihilation. Thoughts came spontaneously.
“In the breakfast manifold, are there empty subspaces? Can there be breakfasts that no one has ever eaten? With a theoretical model of breakfast, can we derive the existence of ‘dark breakfasts’, breakfasts that we know should exist, but have never seen?”.
The curtain of reality had pulled back for me, and I could no longer pretend to be ignorant of these aging possibilities. I angrily started mapping out the known breakfast. If the dark breakfast exists, I should be able to find it in the gaps of the normal familiar world.
First I mapped out everything I could remember from memory, pancakes, crepes, waffles, scrambled eggs, popovers, omelets, and after that, racked my brain for every fast I had ever broken. The beginnings of the outline for breakfast began to reveal themselves. There was a gaping hole staring back at me, but I couldn’t be sure yet. I had to search the dark corners of the world to see if, in some distant land, that gap had yet been filled. I called upon the friendly ghosts. I paged ancient tombs. I added kaiserschmaren, Swedish pancake, dan bing, madeleines, crumpets, clafoutis, blinis, pannu kakku, parathas, nelesniki. Little by little the map was filled, but to no avail. There was a gap left in the fabric of breakfast.
I searched for benign explanations. Could it be that the milk is too heavy, and by adding the weight of the amount of boiling water I am tilting the simplex too far in its direction? Could it be that by excluding slices of bread as an ingredient, because they are not raw flour and do not go into the mixing bowl, I have excluded breakfast items like French toast, eggs in the basket, breakfast burritos and breakfast sandwiches that might have saved us so far? Could I ignore some mysterious culture that breaks its fast with dumplings or egg noodles? None of these satisfied me. Abyss looked back.
I was able to group breakfast into three major areas:
- Pancake Local Group: Most traditional breakfasts, pancakes, crepes, waffles and all their international versions are found here. The place here is disorganized and broken. Any slight deviation from your prescription in this area is likely to cause something else entirely. The breakfast here is excellent. (Prior research on Pancake Cluster)
- Baked Good Quadrant: By tradition the items here are breakfast only. Any of them can be, and often are, served at other meals.
- Egg Singularity and Custard Accretion Disk: While only omelette is labeled for brevity, there are dozens of named recipes that can be placed on top of the pureed egg point, easy, sunny side up, hard boiled, soft boiled, etc. Of these, a small tail of egg-based dishes follow down the right side, each with some amount of milk added, often a variable or alternating amount.
I continued my research for several days and finally found a clue. In an obscure document on the website of the International House of Pancake Corporation there was an indication that Dark Breakfast had been created. The IHOP omelette includes pancake batter. While I can’t exactly put the IHOP omelette on the map, by distinguishing between pancakes and omelettes, we can determine where they should be, and confirm that the manifold possibilities do indeed pass through the dark breakfast abyss.
We don’t know why the Dark Breakfast Abyss is empty. But anthropological reasoning should lead us to conclude that it is empty with good reason. The International House of Pancakes is playing a dangerous game. If someday a distant IHOP squirts a little too much batter into their omelets, cooks up the forbidden breakfast, and thus ends the world, at least we know Waffle House will be open.
For other breakfast scholars who want to further my study, I provide my data and code. If you’re foolish enough to want to explore the limits of deep breakfast yourself, the recipe is as follows:
deep breakfast
Material:
- ¼ cup milk
- 4 eggs
- ½ cup flour
Instruction: unknown
I think the most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a quiet island of ignorance amidst the black sea of infinity, and it was not meant that we should travel far. Science, each pressing in its own direction, has so far done us very little harm; But someday the combination of disparate knowledge will reveal such a terrifying landscape of reality, and our fearful position in it, that we will either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
HP Lovecraft – Call of Cthulhu
<a href