Neuves-Granges: Breakfast

Dad used to tell me, "Morning is the best time of the day..." and he did not like us to stay in bed until more than eight o'clock. But even though I was an early riser, I sometimes found him already started his day in the sitting room when I went downstairs after the clock had struck six.

With Ernest and Nicole, the scenario was totally different. I was always the first one to get up in the house. If Nicole had not laid the table for breakfast the previous night, I would get bowls and cups from the wall cupboard, outside which I could find postcards from all over the world, and the one I had sent during a flight with MAS more than ten years ago!

Next, I opened the kitchen drawer to look for knives and teaspoons. Then I would take out butter, jam and cancoillote cheese from the refrigerator.

Around nine o'clock, Ernest came out from his bedroom. We had a special way to greet each other a good morning: We bowed slightly and said, "Namasté!", a salutation that he had learnt during a trip to Nepal. And we modified it by removing the hands folded gesture and adding orally "May the grace of the God be with you." or "May God bless you".

In Melaka, I usually take my breakfast at 7am. When Dad was around in Batu Pahat, I would go to the kitchen when he was ready to have his rice and milo at 8.30am. Although I had eaten some bread or crackers earlier, I would still nibble other things he had bought, simply keeping him company and chatting with him.

In Neuves-Granges, I just patiently waited for Ernest to prepare breakfast together. Once the water started to boil in the saucepan,

he was the one to serve me drink and we both sat at the small round table, on which he had put his pills that he was keeping in a plastic drawer.

For health reason, he no longer drank coffee every morning. Instead, he took a kind of chicory drink which tasted like coffee when no sugar nor milk were added.

A typical French breakfast in their house consisted of wholemeal bread, butter, jam and honey. To vary, they sometimes bought muesli, croissants, chocolate bread, raisin bread, "biscottes" (a kind of hard dried bread), etc. As I had a sweet tooth, especially in the morning, I never got bored with them. Ernest did not go for jam or honey. He was addicted to the cancoillote cheese, a speciality of Franche-Comté created two thousand years ago. It had a pale creamy-yellow colour, shiny and a half liquidy texture. It was so sticky that when he used a teaspoon to scoop it, it could be pulled up to twenty centimetres!

When he spread cancoillote on his bread or just put directly into his mouth, I could see his face as shiny as the cheese!

"Eat the cancoillote, Lee Sah. It's the only low fat cheese I can consume a lot and every day. And it's tasty!"

I noticed he could finish the whole pot within a week.

"Eat the walnuts," after breaking the hard skin with a pair of pincers, he passed to me a few nuts, shapped like human brains. "They give you energy. But not more than five a day."

"And the bread. The fragrance is different if you smell the upper side, the lower side or the inside."

I would never have this kind of conversation with my Malaysian fellows.

When Nicole joined us, we usually had prepared her hot milk and had cut a few pieces of bread for her. Before sitting down, she would kiss me and ask me if I had slept well. Then I would do the same. She liked to dip her bread with butter and jam in her bowl of milk before having a bite on it. And she always had a good appetite for her first meal of the day.

I looked at them, thinking of my late father with his rice and my mother with her soup noodles for breakfast in Malaysia. My parents would crave for salty food in Neuves-Granges every morning!