Set Point
While the traditional Japanese breakfast of small dishes like miso soup with rice, shiozuke, and eggs seasoned with sugar and soy sauce, spotlighted in SAVEUR's "World of Breakfast" (issue #114), is a staple in many households, countless other Japanese prefer to pick up a more Western-influenced meal—known in the country's urban coffee shops as mooningu-setto, "morning set"—on their way to work.
Merry White, a professor of anthropology at Boston University, has been fascinated with the Japanese breakfast since her first visit to Tokyo, in 1963. Although she has since authored articles and books on everything from Hello Kitty to what to eat at a sumo match, her first love has always been the food and social life of Japan's thriving café culture. In her latest book, Café Society in Japan (University of California Press, 2009), White traces the origins of the morning set, charting its history and lore as far back as the 17th century.
What first sparked your interest in Japan's café culture?
I started going to Japan in 1963, which was a boom time for cafés. I specifically remember one four-story place called the Vienna where they played nothing but Mozart and served sachertorte. It bowled me over. But there were three or four coffee shops on every block; I'd never seen anything in New York or anywhere else in the world to match it.
This was also during the Japanese boom in white-collar work, when so-called salarymen began to depend on cafés for all sorts of different services, including breakfasts like the morning set. Since I was already spending most of my time in Japan in cafés, I thought, Why not study them?
What does the morning set contain?
It varies, but it always includes egg—often a hard-boiled one that's been sitting on the counter for a while, the way English pubs do it. The rest is usually more or less an American-style breakfast: toast, coffee. But the most interesting component is the salad; it's impossible to find a morning set that doesn't have a little bowl of shredded cabbage or shredded lettuce topped with a tomato.
The salad seems out of place. How does it fit in?
When salad was added, the morning set became something the Japanese could call a meal and serve at a café. The rest of the components are seen as snacks, but the salad made it a whole breakfast.
What about the toast?
The toast is almost always made out of a mile-high white bread called shokkupan that is unsullied by flavor. It's squishy, marshmallowy, Wonder bread–y. People, especially Japanese living overseas, get very nostalgic about shokkupan. Japanese bakeries in New York and Boston even sell it now. It's not multigrain; it doesn't crunch or contain little things that get between your teeth. It's just plain old bread. And that makes it sort of retro these days.
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