As of this Sunday, brunch season has been officially opened at 2324 Eunice St. I say officially because there’s been a few “warmup” brunches in the past couple of months. It’s been uncommonly rainy this year, and past Sundays have either been too busy or too uncertainly sunny to be more than a casual consuming of waffles, but yesterday was brilliant and warm and well just about perfect: yet more evidence that I have some mad intuition for timing.

We’ve been doing brunches at the Eunice house for four years now, and I believe this qualifies me as a master brunchxpert. Although I’m not prepared to release the full details of my knowledge (the many special ingredients in my waffle recipe, for example), I will enumerate the principal components of a successful brunch:

1. Bacon. All of these elements are of roughly equal importance, but bacon really is sort of a first among equals. Not just any bacon will do, i.e. do not buy the cheapy stuff that comes in a shrink-wrapped package. Vegematerians may find their bacon needs satisfied by Fakin’ Bacon (tm?) but those of us on the dark side have come to accept only the highest quality stuff. The old reliable standby is the thick-cut peppered bacon we get from Andronico’s, but now we’ve come to prefer the very very fatty stuff from The Fatted Calf which we buy at the Saturday farmer’s market. Preparation is key. Only Peter and Jean-Paul are really to be trusted with this task, which involves slow-cooking about a pound of the stuff at a time in a big iron skillet. Laying the stuff out in parallel strips does not cut the muster. Also, make sure you have enough bacon. Attrition is a huge problem: the cooks will eat about half of it, people will come into the kitchen in order to steal it, and if the plate reaches the table with only a few strips left there will be unhappiness.

2. Coffee. It does not matter if you start your brunch at 10 am or after noon; people will come in the door with slouching backs and a slightly demented look in their eyes, and you must repair that situation immediately. Now, it’s true that coffee for some people is simply a vehicle for that most addictive of legal substances, caffeine, but in the hands of the right authorities it can reach near transcendence. You need good beans, freshly roasted. We like Blue Bottle’s Three Africans, but if you live in any major city you should be able to get something local and tasty. Peter and Jean-Paul have some mad skillz with the French press. There is a lot of stirring and pouring, and argument over the exact right time to grind the beans. The advantage of the presspot is that you get a nice suspension of fine particulates, which help to hold the cream up and give the coffee a nice, rich, almost meaty taste.

3. Waffles. Again, some people consider the waffle to be the humblest of breakfast instruments, designed only to hold syrup and butter and fruit. These people are in need of some education. There is endless scope for creativity in the making of waffle batter, and it is impossible to put any love in your waffles if you aren’t giving your creativity its full range. Over the years I’ve retired from the rest of the kitchen in order to give my full attention to my true calling as a wafflexpert. I don’t have a fixed recipie. There are essentials, of course: flour, eggs, butter, baking soda, milk, and I invariably separate the whites, beat them, and fold them back into the batter. But within this framework I’ve developed an intuition for different types of flour, milk, beer, various solid and liquid additives. I truly can’t say what sort of waffle I’m going to make when I wake up on Sunday morning, but every batch is special, and I think that’s what people like.

4. Sunlight. We have a lovely south-facing deck in the Berkeley hills overlooking a fantastic garden. When the sun is bright in his sky and a slight breeze is blowing you realize that there’s really no point in going anywhere else, and this is the key element in what I like to call luxuriance. It’s not a proper Sunday unless you can just stay put, be lazy, and enjoy being alive. For those of you in less favorable climes, you have my sympathy. I’m sure there has to be something good about living in some damp, cold place where winter lasts until mid-May and all your good summer weather is too hot, humid, and prone to thunderstorms, like reliable taxis or tall buildings or something.

5. People. The point of all of the above, of course, is to get people to come over to your house and enjoy themselves. In that respect I’m extraordinarily lucky. What more can I say than that?

(cdm | BrunchSeason2005 )