How to Make the Perfect Country Breakfast

As the James Beard Award-nominated chef behind Manhattan hotspots Jupiter and King, British chef Clare de Boer knows a thing or two about putting together a satisfying meal. But with her first solo restaurant, Stissing House—housed in an 18th-century tavern in a peaceful corner of Hudson Valley—de Boer is branching out into a new kind of comfort food, inspired by the region’s Shaker history and with a firm emphasis on local, seasonal produce. 

As she launches her first breakfast service at Stissing House, here, de Boer writes for Vogue about her ongoing love affair with the morning meal—and how to recreate one of her classic country dishes at home.

A country breakfast is all about bounty, and the very best basics. At one point, though, my pursuit of said basics was so extreme I got a flock of chickens whose breeds I hand-picked for the colors of their eggs. I spent a month refilling the chicks’ water dripper during the night while they lived under a heat lamp in my tub. It took 19 weeks before they started to lay (and just as long for their smell to leave my room); less than a year later, a raccoon had terminated the farmstead fantasy altogether. I decided that weekends are for excess without trying hard. Bucolic bounty, sure, but assisted by the supermarket and a freezer instead.

Abundance, after all, can be achieved with just three dishes: Something warm to anchor the meal, and a couple of other things to get people to pass plates and hang out at the table. If you have good eggs—the fresh, free-roaming kind—then celebrate them as the centerpiece. (Good eggs are expensive but worth it.) If your eggs aren’t stars, make waffles instead, which are more suitable for larger groups of people than pancakes because you can make several at a time.

Whatever else goes on the table should be convenient, and give you permission to become a collector of sorts. Fill your freezer with the best sausages and bacon you can find. If great bread is hard to come by at the drop of a hat, then keep some in the freezer, too (sliced, for easy toasting). The next time you’re seduced by the frilled lid of a fancy jar of jam at the market stall, buy it.