Oddly, I don’t remember eating anything particular for breakfast during school days.
It’s possibly my family withheld food in the early morning, to toughen us kids up.
Oddly, I don’t remember eating anything particular for breakfast during school days.
It’s possibly my family withheld food in the early morning, to toughen us kids up.
My mom was home until I was in HS and breakfast was usually cold cereal, which we’d serve ourselves. She’d make toast and put it on the table for me and my brother, and she’d make our lunches. She made her own bread for us and because it needed to be cut, so it wasn’t really self-serve for kids.
In winter she’d make us hot cereal: oatmeal, cream of wheat, sometimes corn meal mush, and wheateena (yuck, didn’t like).
Every now and then she’d make a coffee cake of some sort on a weekday, or there would be grapefruits (the only breakfast fruit I remember). Weekends were usually eggs and bacon or donuts/bagels.
She only let us have the sugary cereals once a year - we could pick out a box on our birthday. But she kept a sugar bowl on the table so we were free to load as much onto our cheerios or Kix (the roof of my mouth is still scarred) as we wanted and the end of a bowl of cereal was always milky sugar, yum.
I had a SAHM, (1950’s) and breakfast for me was a piece of buttered toast and tea with milk and sugar. I really struggled to finish that as I am not a breakfast person. To this day I can only tolerate coffee until it is very close to noontime. My siblings had cold cereal, toast and tea. I would make deals with my older brother so he would eat my toast and I could leave the table.
Today, breakfast food makes a nice lunch or dinner for me
Things I had regularly for breakfast on school days as a kid:
Carnation instant breakfast
Space food sticks
Breakfast squares
Pop tarts, especially brown sugar/cinnamon
Danish go rounds
Shake a puddin’
NOT all at once, I went thru phases where I would eat that item for breakfast week after week before moving on to another
I wasn’t big into cereal for breakfast, that was for snacking on dry after school
I remember that cereal! If you eat enough bowls, you’ll be so wired you’ll start talking to your stuffed animals!
(Although I hear they’re kind of bland until you scoop sugar on them).
My dad was often the breakfast cook, especially on schooldays. My whole damn family, with the notable exception of me, is quite diurnal, but Daddy bounces up cheerfully awake and humming at 5 am. His morning routines were simpler than my mom’s so he’d go into the kitchen, start the coffee, set the table, and slice grapefruits or pour orange juice or whatever.
There were meals that were “mom food” meals instead: pancakes or waffles (although he’d fry the sausages or bacon while she set up the mixer to make the batter), or if there were going to be biscuits. If it was going to be an egg breakfast, he was the cook. We had simpler breakfasts too of course (cold cereal out of the box, pop-tarts, sweetrolls and donuts, leftover biscuits with a slice of cheddar cheese melted between layers, instant oatmeal). Saturday morning was most often the big breakfast (grits, eggs, biscuits, sausage or ham or bacon). Sunday morning was traditionally sweetrolls and donuts.
Me, I’d stumble out on schoolday mornings bleary-eyed, resentful of having to be awake at 5:30, and Daddy’s saying Cute Dad Things to make us smile and instead I’m going * wuuuuh? ugh, too loud. No talk! * He’d have the black and white TV on to watch a morning new show called The Good Morning Show.
Bouncy cheerful music and chatty hosts cracking jokes and reporting the light news. ( *ugh! too energetic! make it go awaaaay! * )
On school days, from about age 8 or 9 on (so, ~1973 to 1983), I was nearly always the first one up in my household – I’d wake up sometime around 6am. I’d make my own breakfast, which was typically some brand of cold cereal (e.g., Apple Jacks, Froot Loops, Cap’n Crunch, etc.) with milk, some orange juice, and maybe a Pop-Tart if we had them; I’d then eat breakfast while watching TV.
A hot breakfast, cooked by my mom, would have been a Sunday thing.
Busted! 
My mother was an artist, so she was at home. Most mornings we had cold cereal such as Cap’n Crunch or Life with milk. We fetched this ourselves, but most mornings I didn’t bother.
I remember eggs over easy with challah sometimes, probably on the weekend. When I was older, I could have a glass of half-milk, half-coffee.
My mother provided no training in or encouragement of us cooking. She’s still surprised that I’ve become an excellent cook. My sister can cook if she has to, but usually eats out or heats something up.
Cold cereal most days. If we were lucky, we got the little mini-boxes that were perforated so that the box itself became the bowl. If it was cold out, we often got oatmeal, usually with raisins.
On weekends, though, dad cooked. Scrambled eggs, bacon, biscuits, sausage patties, pancakes. Or fried eggs with grits and sausage gravy over biscuits.
Both of my parents worked. Oddly, I don’t remember what they would have for breakfast, maybe they finished theirs before we (my sister and I) showed up at the table. I always had cold cereal with milk and sugar, toast with margarine and jam (the jam was homemade, but the real butter was reserved for my parents), fruit (home-canned or home-frozen fruit in the winter, usually melons when they were in season), and a glass of milk. My mother dished up the fruit or sliced and served the melons, but I think that’s all she did for breakfast during the week (and on Saturday). Sunday was the day we got a cooked breakfast. Sunday’s breakfast had to last us until 2:00 dinner, so it was more hearty than usual.
My mother did all her own fruit canning, including peaches, pears, apricots and plums. There were also frozen berries – strawberries, raspberries, boysenberries and blackberries. I attribute my lifelong general good health to all that fruit, plus the tablespoon of cod liver oil I had to take every morning and evening until I went to high school, and the half an orange that went with it to kill the taste.
A British SAHM for a change.
My memory of breakfasts is: basically whatever the fad was, that’s what we ate. Article in the Daily Express saying that a cooked breakfast was the essential start to the day? Yep, for a month it would be bacon, eggs, sausage and fried bread. Hey, guess what - grapefruit for breakfast is the best way to lose weight! Every morning, half a grapefruit (with thick crust of sugar on it). Other fads were soft boiled eggs and toast; porridge (which I hated); I think toast and peanut butter for a while. Certainly marmalade (which I hated) passed through… And in between being led by the Daily Express, cornflakes with milk and sugar. If my memory was good enough, I could probably count on my fingers the number of times we had a different breakfast cereal.
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I guess my mom sort of made breakfast, but I liked frozen waffles with syrup, so it wasn’t particularly intensive breakfast making. Can’t imagine eating something that sugary nowadays on a regular basis, but as a kid and a teenager I was addicted to them.
On weekends, I often made breakfast for everyone – pancakes from a mix by the time I was eight or nine, and by high school I had branched out into crepes and French toast.
My mom absolutely refused to buy sugary cereal, funnily enough, but waffles and pancakes doused in syrup were considered acceptable. I don’t know why.
During the school week, the kids would have either cold cereal (Alpha-Bits and Frosted Flakes were popular, but nothing more exotic than that), toast with peanut butter and jam, or Quaker instant oatmeal. On the weekends, sometimes we’d have something more time-consuming like bacon and eggs, omelets, waffles or pancakes (if dad was making breakfast, bacon was de rigueur).
Likewise, I’m not sure why Alpha-Bits and Frosted Flakes didn’t qualify as “sugary cereal” in my house.
Both my parents worked, and everyone got their own breakfast independently. Dad liked cheese on toast, and mum favoured yoghurt sprinkled with muesli. I followed my dad’s example. To this day, cold breakfasts depress me.
Cereal was weird stuff other people had at their houses - it’s possible that a couple of boxes were bought at some point in my childhood to make birthday party treats, but that’s about it.
When I stayed at my gran’s, which I did once a week, she would make a soft boiled egg in an egg cup with “toast soldiers”. I loved that. I don’t think cereal ever darkened her door either.
Mom cooked breakfast of various types generally to my taste. I went through different food preferences over the years and had everything from sunny side eggs and bacon, soft boiled eggs, to omelets, to ham cream cheese on an english muffin, to pizza (frozen type, including french bread type yum) to TV dinners. Gradually I started to question the need of dedicated breakfast foods, and branched out to more dinner type foods as that was more to my liking.
Cereal was sort of a mystery to me, not that I have not tasted it but why would someone eat that stuff. In camp they served cereal, I tried it but felt ill, so then I started skipping breakfast and that worked for me, and back then as long as the kid had all their parts when they returned us as they had when they got us that was considered a job well done, so no harm no foul.
Recollection is a bit foggy (1950s), but IIRC my SAHM usually served scrambled eggs and toast, maybe with a slice or two of bacon*. Sometimes French toast. Pancakes were the domain of my father, so we only saw them on weekends.
Except for Fridays and Lent, when softboiled eggs
were the order of the day. (I once got a partly-developed egg on Friday; I don’t recall whether my mother was more upset about the egg itself or the fact that I’d inadvertently eaten meat.)
* We ate a lot of bacon for breakfast, which I later attributed to a wartime habit of saving bacon grease for munitions).
My mother was a SAHM up until about 1974 (when I was 11) or so, but weekday breakfasts before and after she got a job were the same - toast or cereal with the occasional Carnation instant breakfast or pop-tarts.
I have memories of Cheerios and Carnation Instant Breakfast. Weekends we might have eggs, bacon, and toast types things.
But starting around age 8 I gained the habit of eating a cheese sandwich (NOT a grilled cheese, just a sandwich made of cheese) and a cup of tea for breakfast.
50 years later I still nearly always have a cheese sandwich and cup of tea for breakfast.
When I was a kid mom fixed it for me. Now I fix it. Hey, works for me.