The Financial Times tells us that the power breakfast is on its way back, though participation has been slimmed down from the teams that indulged during the profligate 1990’s to a few key players today. This certainly is good news for the embryonic corporate lawyer – more power breakfasts mean more deals, which means more business for all the various parasites that buzz around the pulsing body of American capitalism. But the news, good though it is, leaves a question in the mind of the discerning food obsessive – what exactly is a power breakfast, and can the dedicated home chef do better?

The first part of that question benefits from an examination of one of the most famous venues for that important sounding meal. Michael’s Restaurant in New York offers a selection of typical foods for the spendthrift wheeler dealer – a fruit salad for $13.00, topped with yogurt for $19.00. Eggs Benedict, the traditional poached egg dish, goes for a mere $16.00: for the same price you can get the cured rather than smoked salmon delicacy gravlax, accompanied by what one hopes is a good bagel. As for baked goods, the best Michael’s does is either brioche toast or fresh baked muffins – for $4.50 and $5.50 respectively.

These options all sound perfectly pleasant, of course. One could hardly expect otherwise for so much money, and a very superior gravlax may indeed be worth it. But in case you haven’t closed a deal recently, or can’t envision spending that much money to pretend that you have, I’ve got a few suggestions.

I hardly can imagine a really good breakfast without baked goods and sweets. These, to me, are the cornerstone of the morning indulgence, even more so than the ever-present panoply of egg dishes. Certainly, an elegant rolled omelet is wonderful if you’re careful about the quality of the butter and the egg– but even it bows in my mind before the shapely blonde twins Challah and Brioche. The latter is sweet, rich, deeply indulgent, and in its most extreme forms veritably groans under the weight of some 200 grams of good butter and three pure eggs per bread. Its Jewish sibling is rather more austere, and yet no less delicious for all that, sweetened at its best with honey rather than sugar, devoid of the butter that gives the brioche its pillowy softness and yet endowed with a more formidable texture in return. Either one of these alone, with a steaming bowl of coffee or cup of tea, would serve as a perfectly excellent breakfast for me. And when I say either one of these, I do mean the whole thing – I’ve rarely succeeded in stopping after a few slices, though once in a blue moon I will remember how nice stale brioche French toast tastes the next morning, or that toasted brioche goes particularly well with a rough country pate and pickles.

I admit, though, that some eaters of good taste might prefer a more varied beginning, even if they prefer to stay within the bounds imposed by flour, eggs, butter, and sugar. In the fall, you wouldn’t go wrong with thinking about pumpkins in the form of this densely sweet pumpkin and orange syrup, though I doubt that ice cream or what we seem to call yogurt really has any business accompanying an already satisfying cake. Moderation is the acme of cooking, it seems to me – if adding more butter or sugar or cream made a better dish, then our greatest cooks would need to learn nothing more. That’s why some people might prefer a hearty date bread for breakfast, served warm and perhaps spread with the thinnest drizzle of your favorite topping, just to add the faintest hint of flavor.

But baked goods alone do not a power breakfast make. I can already hear the winged perpetrators of Atkins’s folly complaining, with some justification. These are all carbs, they say. And certainly, we shouldn’t stop with merely the items I’ve listed. Many people have bad memories of scrambled eggs as a lumpy disaster of institutional cooking, but this hardly needs to be the case. Either cooked three per person for a few moments in a hot pan with singing fat, or slowly nursed to gentle curds in a double boiler, and finished luxuriously with rich cream, scrambled eggs served with sturdy oatcakes and perhaps a naturally smoked kipper simmered gently in milk for a few minutes are one of the best breakfasts. As the great food writer Richard Olney has written, “correctly prepared, . . . scrambled eggs number among the very great delicacies of the table”.

Nor do I automatically discount the stranger entrants to the world of morning eating. My favorite among this motley band, however, is the imperial Kedgeree, a fragrant, delicious rice of eggs, smoked fish, and threads of vibrant saffron (or powdered turmeric, if your aesthetic sense demands yellow but your wallet dare not), all turned enthusiastically in either bought or home made ghee. As for Michael’s “Benedict”, I frankly prefer my poached eggs perched atop day old French bread toasted lightly with a little oil, and anointed first with mushroom puree flavored with sherry or vermouth, light cream, thyme, and lemon, and then finished if you’re feeling particularly indulgent or successful with a hollandaise of more butter whisked into three whipped eggs over a light fire.

Obviously, this rather long post hardly exhausts the possibilities for the dealmaker or the serious eater. It’s with some trepidation that I leave out beignets, a recipe for how to make gravlax, a stab at bagels and bialys, some suggestions about cream cheese, and recipes for waffles and pancakes. I shudder to think that some deprived soul might forget about cinnamon rolls because I’ve forgotten to mention them, and if I had more time I would delve into the vexed questions of the precise type of butter, brand of coffee, or leaf of tea. But for the moment I’ll leave the topic content, for it’s night again – and well, I’m hungry.

*My thanks to one of my best friends, without whose help this essay doesn't exist - food, after all, is a collaborative thing. I hardly feel bad about asking the talented for help.

Just so y'all know, there's some slight chance that Crescat will have (alack!) still more bandwidth problems toward the end of this month. I'm currently in touch with the helpful-if-baffling folks at Total Choice Hosting to see what's going on, but, as I say, there's a possibility.

So, be sure to go back and read Waddling Thunder's Ten-Thousand Miles post from last Saturday if you missed it, just in case it's down for a few days. [There must be people who don't read blogs on weekends. My boss used to wonder what was wrong with people who didn't check their email on weekends, he wondered if they didn't shave either. Right. Sorry. My mind is wandering.]

Check out Professor Leiter on who may be behind the now (apparently) defunt Proculian Meditations.

Paul Goyette at locussolus is trying to create a Chicago blog map by el stop along the lines of the DC Metro blog map. The south side is currently underrepresented, if anyone would like to help him out by emailing him his (or her, or their, if it's a group blog) blog's relevant info.

It's been some time since we last published an installment in our "20 Questions" series, but I hope that the wait has been worth it. We are now honored to post 20 Questions with Eugene Volokh, a Professor of Law at UCLA, and the blogger-in-chief of the famed Volokh Conspiracy. Read on as Professor Volokh discusses his legal writing, his "big e-mouth", and chickens.

1: What made you decide to start blogging?

My big e-mouth. I realized that I had stuff that I wanted to say, and couldn't conveniently say in the rather confining frameworks of law review articles or op-eds. I think that wanting to say what's on your mind is part of human nature. In some of us, it's such a big part that we're willing to take a lot of time and effort to do it.

2: Finishing college at age 15 is pretty darn precocious. How did that happen?

I was good at math from a very young age, and that's a flashy talent -- it can be easily noticed and measured. So schools were willing to let me skip grades, and let me in early, and my parents realized that I'd learn better if I did skip grades.

3: Before clerking for the Supreme Court, you clerked for Ninth Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski (my hero), and later wrote
Mine, too!
an article with him, have had him lecture to your class, and had him write an introduction to your book. How did your clerkship develop into such a relationship? And have you ever considered asking Judge Kozinski to join The Conspiracy?

The Judge is generally very close to his clerks, and often coauthors articles with them -- he's very open to having a close professional and personal relationship with his clerks. I would love to have him be a co-Conspirator, but I highly doubt that he'd be inclined to do it. Blogging works best when it's spontaneous, and thus easy and fun for the blogger. When you have the position and stature that Kozinski does, though, you have to carefully think about and edit anything you publish. That takes a lot of work, and I can't imagine how anyone as busy as the Judge would be able to (or want to) put in that kind of work.

4: On a closely-related follow-up, comparing Judges Reinhardt and Kozinski, you wrote:

(. . . they're two of the smartest court of appeals judges in the country, though Kozinski is almost always right and Reinhardt is almost always wrong).

Hei Lun at Begging to Differ has a response to the foul-trouble question I blogged about earlier. She writes:

If a player in foul trouble stays in the game, and doesn't change his defense, he will probably foul out before the game is over. Because the other team will be actively seeking to get him to foul, that player will likely foul more frequently than his regular pace. Then net effect is that the player will end up playing fewer minutes than if he were taken out after getting in foul trouble.

David Edelstein may have been a bit over enthusiastic when he declared Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to be the best movie in ten years (Shakespeare in Love? The Talented Mr. Ripley? Lord of the Rings?) But it was very very very good. Go. See.

[Of course, my lack of David Edelstein's abject worship might be due to the incredibly annoying couple who sat (nee-- reclined in one another's laps) next to me. I didn't mind so much when they were making out, because then at least they were quiet.]

It shall bear re-watching not just because of that, however, but because it was good in that way that makes you want to go back and see it several times right away.

Also, the New York Times has a much less laudatory, totally unfair and wrong review.

(disappearing and reappearing posts... slight technical problems)

It is imperative for the newer industrialized areas such as the Southeast to plan now for their "old age." When other areas, in Latin America and Asia, are industrially developed, the South will suffer the same pangs of aging now suffered by New England. This is particularly true because of the concentration of the southeast states upon the vulnerable American textile industry. In 1950 the three largest textile states of the South had 57 per cent, 67 per cent, and 39 per cent of their manufacturing employment in textiles. Already employment in these states has been affected by the impact of synthetic fibers, foreign competition, and migration on the cotton textile industry.

Leaving physical violence against labor organizers aside, is it really unfair in a way that the government should correct if Massachusetts textile mills tend to pay $1.20/hour, but federal minumum wage is $0.75/hour and Southern mills tend to pay $1.05/hour? Standards of living are cheaper in the South (I still haven't gotten over the shock of non-Louisiana housing prices, but I also made minimum wage when I last worked there). Why, in such a case, would you expect the firms to stay in the Northeast of the costs of relocating to the South were outweighed by the expected benefit? The immediate effect was severe for some people: the post-WWII job losses hit 20%, Kennedy says, in some one-industry towns. Still, I'm not sure that the rest of the country really would as worked up over the Northeast plight as a Northeastern senator would:

Although the New England states are far from depressed or undeveloped, and their citizens still enjoy a standard of living and per capita income above that of the nation as a whole, the lack of sufficient new industry to replace the old plants lost to the South has retarded New England's economic growth. Its industrialization, manufacturing employment, and per capita income have not kept pace with increases in the rest of the country. The year 1952-1953 was one of New England's most prosperous years; yet the region lagged behind national increases in total income and manufacturing payrolls and suffered a serious loss of employment in nonelectrical machinery, textiles, apparel, leather products, and several other industries

Now another senator whose constitutents are loosing their textile jobs seeks our sympathy: Fritz Hollings (D-SC) wrote that Protectionism Happens to be Congress's Job for the WaPo's Sunday Outlook. He complains about the costs imposed by the EPA or the ADA, but wants the living standards those give us. He says he's for free trade, but manages to fit economic protectionism in

The Washington mantra of "retrain, retrain" comes up short. For example, Oneita Industries closed its T-shirt plant in Andrews, S.C., back in 1999. The plant had 487 employees averaging 47 years of age. Let's assume they were "retrained" and became 487 skilled computer operators. Who is going to hire a 47-year-old operator over a 21-year-old operator? No one is going to take on the retirement and health costs of the 47-year-old. Moreover, that computer job probably just left for Bangalore, India.

According to the election-year bluster of politicians and pundits, the outsourcing of American jobs to other countries has become a problem of epic proportion. Fortunately, this alarmism is misguided. Outsourcing actually brings far more benefits than costs, both now and in the long run. If its critics succeed in provoking a new wave of American protectionism, the consequences will be disastrous -- for the U.S. economy and for the American workers they claim to defend.

The degree requirement for English majors at Chicago once required students in the department to pass tests on two separate reading lists: The B.A. qualifying list and the B.A. examination list (now the department the only requires a formal B.A. paper from those students who wish to graduate with honors. I chose to go without, and save my sanity and weekends). The reading lists are mostly forgotten to the past now -- I learned of them from a small reference in the essay "A Real Page Turner" in Joseph Epstein's (A.B., 1957) Narcissus Leaves the Pool:

"At the University of Chicago in my day, English majors were presented with a junior- and senior-year reading list of important books -- not offered in regular courses -- on which they were tested. The list, as I remember it, was a brilliant compilation of those books -- tomes, a vast number of them -- that, if one was normally lazy, one would most certainly avoid reading: Samuel Richardson, Hobbes's Leviathan, lots of John Locke, Paradise Regained (of Paradise Lost Samuel Johnson rightly said that no one ever wished it longer; of Paradise Regained, he might have said that no one ever wished it existed."

(Caution: very long)

B.A. QUALIFYING:

CHAUCER: Canterbury Tales: omit Tale of Melebeus, Monk's Tale, Parson's Tale, but not the prologues to these tales

SIDNEY: Defense of Poetry

MARLOWE: Tamburlaine, Part I

SHAKESPEARE: As You Like It; Othello

JOHNSON: Alchemist

DONNE: Good Morrow; Love's Deity; The Flea; The Will; A Valediction of Weeping; The Sun Rising; The Canonization; The Anniversary; The Ecstasy; The Funeral; The Relic; Satine III; A Hymn to Christ; Hymn to God my God; A Hymn to God the Father

MILTON: Areopagitica; Samson Agonistes

BUNYAN: Pilgrim's Progress, Part I

WYCHERLEY: Country WIfe

ADDISON & STEELE: Spectator essay, Nos. 1, 2, 10, 11, 34, 40, 62, 65, 69, 70, 81, 106, 107, 108, 159, 160, 176, 201, 249, 251, 262, 315, 321, 329, 381, 409, 414, 468, 517

SWIFT: Gulliver's Travels

POPE: Essay on Man*; Rape of the Lock; Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot

GOLDSMITH: She Stoops to Conquer; The Deserted Village; The Citizen of the World (Nos. 11, 13, 18, 21, 39, 50, 51, 54, 55, 71)

BOSWELL: Tour of the Hebrides

FIELDING: Joseph Andrews

WORDSWORTH: Essay: Preface to Lyrical Ballads. Poems: Expostulation, and Reply; Tables Turned; Lucy Gray; Two April Mornings; The Fountain; Michael; Resolution and Independence; Lines above Tintern Abbey; Elegiac Stanzas; Solitary Reeper; Imitations of Immortality; Influence of Natural Objects; The Simplon Pas; Composed upon Westminster Bridge; The World is Too Much with Us; Thoughts of a Briton on the Subjugation of Switzerland

LAMB: Essays of Elia: The South-Sea Home; The Two Races of Man; New Year's Eve; Mrs. Battle's Opinion on Whist; Imperfect Sympathies; Mackery End; In Hertfordshire; The Old Benches of the Inner Temple; Dream Children; A Reverie; On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century. Last Essays of Elia: Preface, by a Friend of the late Elia; The Superannuated Man; Old China. Other Essays: On the Tragedies of Shakespeare

BRYON: Childe Harold, cantos III-IV; Don Juan, cantos II-IV

SHELLEY: Adonais; A Defense of Poetry

AUSTEN: Persuasion

MILL: On Liberty*

BROWNING: The Ring and the Book, Books I, V, VII, X

ARNOLD: Poems: To Marguerite - Continued; Dover Beach; The Scholar Gypsy; Thyrsis; Memorial Voices; Rugby Chapel; Stanzas from Grand Chartreuse. Essays: The Function of Criticism at the Present Time; Sweetness and Light; The Study of Poetry

DICKENS: Great Expectations

SWINBURNE: Laus Veneris; The Triumph of Time; Hymn to Proserpine; The Garden of Proserpine; Dedication to Poems and Ballads First Series; Prelude to Songs Before Sunrise; Hertha; To Walt Whitman in America; Cor Cordinum

JOYCE: Dubliners

FRANKLIN: Rules by which a Great Empire may be reduced to a Small One; An Edict by the King of Prussia

POE: Essays: Review of Twice-Told Tales; The Philosophy of Composition. Tales: The Fall of the House of Usher; The Purloined Letter; The Pit and the Pendulum; The Cask of Amontillado. Poems: Romance; Sonnet - to Science; To Helen; The City in the Sea; Irafel; The Coliseum; To One in Paradise; The Raven; Ulalume; Eldorado

HAWTHORNE: Preface to the House of the Seven Gables; Ethan Brand; My Kinsman, Major Molineux

THOREAU: Walden

WHITMAN: One's Self I Sing; Once I Pass'd Through a Populous City; For You O Democracy; Crossing Brooklyn Ferry; Pioneers! O Pioneers!; Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking; When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer; Beat! Beat! Drums!; Calvary Crossing a Ford; Bivouac on a Mountain Side; The Wound-Dresser; Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun; When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom; There Was a Child Went Forth; Miracles; Passage to India; Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood; To a Locomotive in Winter

MARK TWAIN: Huckleberry Finn; Life on the Mississippi, chaps I-XX

FROST: Mowing; The Demiurge's Laugh; The Death of the Hired Man; Mending Wall; The Hill Wife; Birches; Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening; Two Tramps in Mud-Time; After Apple Picking

B.A. COMPREHENSIVE

___: Beowulf

___: The Owl and the Nightingale; The Rule of Anchoresses; Havelok; Sir Orfeo; Richard Rolle; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Pearl; Piers Plowman; The Second Shepherd's Play

MOORE: Utopia

SPENSER: Faerie Queene, Bks I-II

SHAKESPEARE: Henry IV (Parts I and II)*; Anthony and Cleopatra, Winter's Tale

BACON: Essays: Revenge; Great Place; Friendship; Plantations; Masques and Triumphs; Building; Gardens; Studies; Vicissitude of Things; Goodness and Goodness of Justice; Atheism; Superstition; Riches; Faction

WEBSTER: White David

BROWNE: Hydriotaphia

MILTON: Paradise Lost

MARVELL: Bermudas; To his Coy Mistress; Definition of Love; The Garden; Horation Ode on Cromwell's Return; Dialogue between Soul and Body

DRYDEN: Essay of Dramatic Poetry; Macflecknoe

CONRGREVE: The Way of the World

LOCKE: Second Treatise of Civil Government*

JOHNSON: Life of Milton; Preface to Shakespeare

STERNE: Tristan Shandy

HUME: Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion*

BLAKE: Songs of Innocence; Songs of Experience

COLERIDGE: Ancient Mariner; Kubla Khan; Dejection; Biographia Literaria, chaps. 14, 17, 22

KEATS: Sonnets: When I Have Fears; Bright Star; Chapman's Homer. Ode on a Grecian Urn; Ode on Melancholy; Ode to a Nightingale; To Autumn

SCOTT: Guy Mannering

NEWMAN: Idea of a University, discourses I-IX

TENNYSON: In Memorium

ELIOT: Middlemarch

CONRAD: Nostromo

YEATS: The Tower (the volume, not just the title poem)

SHAW: St. Joan

MELVILLE: Benito Cereno*

EMERSON: Essays: The American Scholar; Self-Reliance; Poems: The Snowstorms; Each and All; The Problem

JAMES: The Spoils of Poynton*; Preface to the Spoils of Poynton; Art of Fiction

ELIOT: Poems: The Waste Land; Prufock. Essays: Tradition and the Individual Talent; The Metaphysical Poets; Hamlet and His Problems. Murder in the Cathedral

FAULKNER: The Bear (in Go Down Moses); Autumn Delta

WILLIAMS: A Streetcar Named Desire

LITERARY HISTORIES:

ENGLAND (read one of the following)
Baugh (ed), A Literary History of England
Craig (ed), A History of English Literature
Moody and Lovette (edited by Millett), A History of English Literature
Osgood, The Voice of England

AMERICA (read on of the following)
Blair, Hornberger, and Stewart, The Literature of the United States (historical interchanges in Vols. I and II and biographies of all American writers who are on the B.A. Qualifying or B.A. Comprehensive Reading Lists)
Blankenship, American Literature
Quinn (ed), The Literature of the American People
Spiller (ed), Literary History of the United States