Fried egg sandwich

Eastside Road, September 10, 2018—

WHEN I WAS a boy, ten and eleven years old, I walked a couple of miles to school every day carrying my lunch, usually in a beat-up paper bag — after lunch I folded it up and put it in my pocket for the next day. In the bag, two sandwiches and a piece of fruit, and maybe a hard-boiled egg.

The sandwiches were on bread my mother baked, bread that obeyed one of those rigorous life-cycles: when the yeast was new the bread was ballooned and full of holes; as the yeast wore out, over a couple of months, the bread got denser and the slices smaller.

There was always one fried-egg sandwich and one peanut-butter-and-something sandwich, jam or honey usually, though now and then Mom forgot that I did not share all her enthusiasms and made it peanut-butter-and-mustard, which I would carefully set aside in the garbage, or throw over the fence for whatever animal might be hungry enough to chance it, for our two-room school was in a village small enough to seem to be in the country.

We still have fried-egg sandwiches: they're quick and simple and tasty, perfect for those evenings you don't want to cook. They're better now, these sandwiches. They're on much better bread — sorry, Mom — from Healdsburg's Downtown Bakery or, as today, from Berkeley's Acme. The eggs don't have troubling dark or bloody spots, and the yolks are runny, because they don't have to be carried for miles.

And these fried-egg sandwiches have another advantage over those I carried to school seventy years ago: they're eaten hot. I do not recommend cold greasy fried-egg sandwiches.

A carrot; fennel. Dessert: a Greek cookie from that marvelous Greek restaurant of a couple of nights ago.

     🍷Zinfandel grape juice, fresh from our vines, in sparkling water