Welcome to Secret Breakfast / An exclusive newsletter, the best place to start your day in a viral Martini multiverse with free croissants and cockroach milk

Hi there!

I haven’t seen it coming, but here it is. Free delivery, priority reservations, unlimited hot and cold drinks, coffee cards, monthly dinner menus, perks… The subscription model is hitting restaurants.

In our AmazonPrimeed-Netflixed-Spotified-World these kinds of programs can be something interesting for hospitality business models. Paying for something you consume regularly looks pretty fair these days.

Have you in mind any restaurant you would subscribe to? What is it like? Please share, I’m curious.

Piero

Picture: Inside Weather via Unsplash

␥

THE BEST QUOTE

✦ Camille Andrea, Le sourire contagieux des croissants au beurre (🇮🇹Italian edition here). The pseudonym Camille Andrea hides the name of an author of French literature, whose identity everyone ignores.

⎚

THE MISSING INGREDIENT

BINGEREADING THE “BLACKWATER”
SOUTHERN SAGA

Michael McDowell’s best-known work is the screenplay for Tim Burton’s film Beetlejuice. He also wrote a Southern Gothic saga called Blackwater and staged it in 1919 Alabama.

These six books were republished in France a few months ago and are trending in Italy too (American first editions can be very pricey if you look for them).

This paperback family drama doesn’t have much cooking in it, but I wrote some notes about it anyway (I’ve read 4 of 6 books).

• White wealthy people had black cooks, housekeepers, and nurses.

• Black people run sugar cane farms.

• Before the Recession, even rich people had a properly cooked meal just for lunch. Dinner was about cold leftovers.

• Corn soup was a staple (★recipe, fancier version).

• The weather was hot in Alabama, and people always drank iced tea, blue raspberry juice, and Coke.

• Boston Cream Pie was the classy cake at the time (★recipe).

• Organic smoked bacon was gold during the war.

• Catfish was fried (★recipe) or stewed (★recipe).

I hope to find more ideas in the next books. For now, I know that 14 foods helped define Alabama's history.

Picture: Blackwater Artist Edition. Book by Michael McDowell; Illustration by Marcela Bolivar.

⎅

THE BOOK

Imperfect Desserts are Sweet Enough

★★★★

Wanting to weaken the humans, Zeus, the Greek king of Gods, decided to cut each being in two. Yes, he created people who love baking and people who do not. As one of this newsletter’s muses, Alison Roman - after a couple though years - is now publishing a book about her “consistently imperfect” desserts: they may be lopsided, wonky, occasionally almost burned, and unevenly frosted, but they look… warm, sweet, and real. I won’t change one Alison with 1,000 Cédric Grolet. Don’t miss the book, her videos, and the Times’ profile about her.

Sweet Enough by Alison Roman
→ Shortplot: 🍓 🍪 🍨 🍍

Ⓡ

RANDOM ACTS OF HUNGER

This is the space where I share some food (un)related stuff of my week

🇨🇳 Every Year Dan Wang writes a - MASSIVE - letter from China. This one about 2022 and its lockdowns is really interesting, but if you don’t have time cut short: [crtl+f] to “Yunnan Cuisine” and Ganba Mushrooms 🐙World's first octopus farm proposals alarm scientists, and alarms me, because I crave Tarte Setoise (★recipe) 🥜Reese’s Cups, chocolate bars made from plants 👵🏼This Restaurant's Kitchen Is Run by Grandmothers from Around the World 🌶José Pizarro’s recipe for smoked pimentón clam rice with chorizo and roast peppers (★recipes) ⚖️The strange history of the body mass index (video) 🥛We already talked about this book, but I forgot to mention the cockroach milk! 🧶Pan de Lana (★recipe, in Spanish) and Vegan Pan de Lana (★recipe) ⚔️Never thought about those: Zucchini and Feta kebabs (★recipe) 🇮🇳India farmers march in protest as onions rot ⚾️Italy’s espresso machine at World Baseball Classic tells everything you have to know about the quality of coffee most Italians drink 🍚Fried rice in 60 seconds and other fried rice secrets (video) 🦐I’ll have the vegan Gumbo (★recipe)

❍ OnlyPans
This is where Secret Breakfast picks juicy content from food creators

⌇⌇⌇

FOOD FOR LATER

Rage against the food machine
Patrick Galbraith / The Guardian

When you buy a “handmade” egg sandwich and you discover it contains 32 ingredients, including diacetyl tartaric acid you know that something’s wrong in your food chain system. Highly processed foods make up +50% of our diet. This is the story behind the book Ravenous: Why Our Appetite Is Killing Us and the Planet, and What We Can Do About It.

Welcome To The Martini Multiverse
Alexis Morillo / Bustle

On TikTok, cocktails inspired by chicken soup, Caesar salads, and red velvet cakes are having the time of their lives.

➤ Last week's most clicked link was the one about the “almond moms”. And that's all for today.