Notes of: Breakfast

Behind August's mood board

Welcome to Notes Of, a new(ish) column on ÀLC! Each month I make a mood board and post it to Instagram as a little exercise in thematic thinking. Notes Of will elaborate on each month’s theme and includes links to relevant articles, videos, products, and more. It’ll be fun!

This month’s mood board was inspired by the best meal of the day: breakfast. Although I’m most likely to speed-eat a boring yogurt or a granola bar on the commute to my computer each morning, my ideal breakfast is simple: fried eggs on buttered toast, a glass of orange juice, and an iced latte with oat milk. And thus, a mood board was born:

In last month’s Notes Of I talked about how I use mood boards and what I consider when I’m pulling images for them, so this month I thought I’d share the three types of “theme boards” I make when I’m doing them for fun:

1. A theme based on a specific texture, pattern, shape, material, or visual device. When I make these boards I’m looking for images that are either an interesting use of the theme or that are somehow adjacent to it. For instance, when I did the lace mood board I used images of actual lace, but I also included a beaded bag that had a lace-like quality to it, shadows made by plants that felt sort of lacey, and a cake that just felt right in the mix. Other examples of themes like this that I’ve done are circles, plaids, monochrome, and metallics.

2. A theme based on an object or thing. These are the easiest ones to make, I think, because I am thinking about a physical item as I poke around for references. For instance, for the shells mood board I looked for images that related to the shape, texture, color, and structure of a shell across a bunch of mediums, like architecture, fabric, and typography. Having one thing to focus on gives me some clear constraints to play in! This was the same for tomatoes and ribbon.

3. A theme based on a scenario, idea, or place. I tend to get most excited about these because they require some imagination. Some lend themselves to something specific, like cowboy hats for the western theme, but they also require a little bit of storytelling to drive the search. What does the American West feel like? What artists managed to capture that feeling? Is there any interesting interpretation of some obvious iconography I can include? This was the same for ballet and this month’s breakfast theme, too.

Have you made a mood board recently? I’d love to see yours and hear about your process!

Anyway, let’s dig in. 10 notes on breakfast:

• “Why are artists and designers so obsessed with eggs?”, House & Garden’s investigation into why the egg is so present in design and architecture. The winning quote: "The egg has a perfect shape, even if it's laid from the ass."

• The breakfast scene from Matilda. Classic.

• Another noteworthy Matilda: Matilda Goad and her toast rack (featured in the mood board lower left.) Everything Matilda Goad makes is adorable but these little toast racks (and their egg cup/plate combos!) are my favorite. They have a whole breakfast table category on their site!

• I reference this video from Bon Appetit (from the before times) all the time: 10 ways to make eggs. I use Alex Delany’s breakfast taco technique and Amiel Stanek’s low and slow method pretty regularly.

• Also featured in the mood board is Dutch still life painter Arnout van Albada’s “Beurre Salé”. Dutch still lifes are famously detailed and often include food, and van Albada’s modern take follows suit with subjects like Jell-O, a hunk of parmesan, and layered cakes.

• Stanley Tucci eats pasta for breakfast so I can too.

• A plug for my favorite local coffee shop: Mandarin Coffee Stand in Pasadena. I’m a regular and can’t say enough good things about this tiny spot and its owner, Sherry Gao. Plus, a couple of weeks ago I witnessed Jeremy Allen White kissing that girl outside of Mandarin and everyone’s saying he called on the paparazzi on himself because there’s no way they were cruising the streets of Pasadena unprompted!!!

• Have you watched The Big Brunch on HBO HBO MAX MAX? It’s a total comfort show (à la The Great British Bake Off and every other domestic competition show out there) but this one’s hosted by Dan Levy and judged by Sohla El-Waylly so it wins. It came out last year but I don’t think it got the attention it deserved!

• One for the designers out there, behold: the Sainsbury Archive. This online collection houses over 150 years of the British grocery store chain’s design history, including ads, packaging designs, images of stores, and more. Start here with the breakfast category!

• I love Nora Ephron for many reasons, but a big one is the way food played a part in her writing. “I have made a lot of mistakes falling in love, and regretted most of them, but never the potatoes that went with them,” Nora once wrote. She never wanted to write a cookbook, but she did leave spiral-bound copies of her recipes (and some stories about them) for her friends and family when she died. One of those recipes was for her monkey bread. In case you’ve maxed out on reading articles on The Cut this month, I’ll include it below:

I’m off to fry an egg. Enjoy your Sunday!

x 

Ali

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Mood board sources (from left to right):

"A not B" by Uta Eisenreich; "Beurre Salé" by Arnout van Albada; "Still life with oranges" by Rafael Romero Barros, 1863; teacup balconies in Kappabashi, Tokyo; 1925 perfume bottle in the shape of an orange; tabletop image by Tatanaka; egg face by Brest Brest Brest; "Morning Glory" by Danielle Mckinney, 2023; "Sketch book, June 2019" by Niki Dionne; fancy egg cup from Casa Shop; breakfast table at Kulm Hotel St. Moritz by Luke Edward Hall; t-shirt from Unsound Rags; tabletop image by Matilda Goad; "Still life with coffee pot, milk jug, cup, bread, and potatoes" by Albert Anker, 1902; early sketch by Andy Warhol; and an image of espresso cups on a tray that I unfortunately can't find the source of for the life of me.