The Sunday-Morning Debate: Sweet or Savory?

When I was a kid, the family habit was to stop on the way home from church at the L&M Bakery. (I’m so happy to see they’re* still in business and still getting rave reviews.) For the six of us, a reasonable guess might be that we’d get, say, a dozen doughnuts and be happy, right?

Oh, no. Nonononononooooo. Not my family. And not when buying from L&M. Try:

• Six or eight doughnuts, including at least one jelly doughnut and a couple chocolate-covered cream doughnuts (which were not the same thing as Boston Creme Doughnuts, you Philistines). Filled, so it seemed, from surface to surface. You’d bite into one of these suckers and you’d have to mop up all around your mouth, sometimes even your cheeks.
• Sticky cinnamon buns, with raisins. Maybe a half-dozen of these. The owners of the Cinnabon brand would fold up their franchises if they knew these existed.
• Crumbly cinnamon-topped “crumb buns.” A favorite of my kid brother, which (as I recall) indicated to me a certain lack of imagination. Until I tried one myself.
• A slab of something called “butter cake.” (I’m still not sure what exactly this was; I’ve never seen it anyplace else. Flat, pan-baked, maybe ¾-inch thick. Sweeeet topping, not quite icing… The topping cracked irregularly during baking, so each piece of butter cake looked like a miniature map of the continents just after they’d started to break up jillions of years ago.)

Now, we didn’t get ALL these things every week. But every week we did get enough, really, for ourselves and a couple neighbor families. Whom we’d never have dreamt of inviting unless they brought their own.

And it would all be gone by Sunday night. **

(What? Of course it wasn’t all we ate all day — we weren’t, y’know, jerks or anything. We had regular Sunday dinners just like everybody else. We just happened to have pastries for dessert. To this day, it amazes me that our family has no history of diabetes or obesity or, as far as I know, even elevated cholesterol. (This drives The Missus mildly crazy.))

What a shock to grow up into the outside world, then, and learn that this was not considered a normal way to round out the weekend. Other people had things like waffles, French toast, and pancakes. (We had those things, too, but as evening meals.) Or — granted, back then these people constituted the lunatic fringe (they could have had their own X-Files episode about them) — fruit.

Oddest of all was that people had things like eggs, sausage, bacon, and home-fries for breakfast.

The first time I went out for Sunday brunch, I couldn’t help thinking I’d fallen asleep and awoken in a different dimension. An entire row of long tables, topped with silver(ish) pans full of… scrambled eggs? breakfast links? pancakes? quiche? for the love of God, crepes?!? Where were the jelly doughnuts?!?

Eventually, of course, I actually had to try some of this myself. It’s a truism about the South that Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnuts drive the engine of the world; less talked about is the influence of all the Waffle Houses, Waffle Huts, Huddle Houses, Village Inns, and so on, with their giant platefuls of scattered-and-smothered home fries, their blazing-hot skillet breakfasts, their heaps of…

…well. Please. Stop me now. Before I embarrass myself by running out to

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* And OMFG, you can order online… I just spent 10 minutes going through the order process and agonizing over the selections, but bailed out before clicking (or even seeing) the final Submit button. The possibility that they might not actually deliver to Florida was just too distressing.

** Once, we managed to score some leftover L&M goods from a church or school function of one kind or another — like, two or three whole bags and boxes more than even we could eat. We put them all in the freezer in the basement — no special wrapping or anything. Just stuck them in there, in their original bakery paper and cardboard. Imagine my outrage six months or a year later when I remembered them and extracted a sample, in secret. Ummmm, I remember thinking, yesss, yess The Precious, MY Precious, my cream doughnut… only to learn from the first bite that “freezer burn” isn’t just a condition which mars the surface  of foods: it provides a whole taste experience of its own. I put the remainder back into the bag and put the bag back into the freezer as a yellow flag for subsequent baked-goods filchers. It’s probably still down there.