John Currence’s “Big Bad Breakfast” cookbook.
One of John Currence’s intentions when opening Big Bad Breakfast was to give breakfast the attention it deserved.
And he did, with several branches (and more to come) of the acclaimed restaurant. Now, with his new cookbook of the same name, Currence will introduce to breakfast fans new dishes inspired by Currence’s past and travels, as well as a number of his much-loved recipes from BBB, including their biscuits, grits, jellies and jams, as well as their pancakes.
“As a child of the late ’60s and ’70s, I have this great fondness for breakfast places I remember existing in New Orleans and North Carolina and Georgia and South Carolina where I visited my grandparents …. I wanted to kind of reference those places that I remember so fondly,” Currence said.
Currence pulled inspiration from his own experiences moving up in the cooking industry. He said he has a recipe called “Tugboat Galley,” consisting of dirty rice and eggs, that he cooked when he worked offshore at his first cooking job.
From a Middle Eastern dish called Shakshuka to the art of making an Asian omelet, Currence’s breakfast book traverses the world to tell stories in the name of the most important meal of the day. In fact, the idea of focusing on only Southern breakfast recipes didn’t sit well with Currence. “We’re rooted in the South, but we’re not defined by it,” he said.
The book begins with a sweet fantasy Currence shared with his Birmingham BBB partner about the ability to drop baskets of sweet breakfast pastries in front of customers. While that would too dramatically increase costs, Currence says he still wishes BBB included more sweet items.
“Because I know everyday there’s nothing better than donuts,” he said.
If Currence began the book with a sugary fantasy, he ended it with any brunch-lover’s dream: cocktails.
“It was really fun to wrap the book up with cocktails, because by the time I got done with it, all I wanted to do was just drink myself to sleep,” Currence said.
Currence, a self-proclaimed proponent for day-drinking, said his cocktails are inspired by Mardi Gras (possibly THE day for day-drinking), a French Quarter dive bar a young Currence once neighbored and even his daughter’s godmother. And of course, there are coffee cocktails. Currence’s stories throughout the book complement and sometimes explain some of his recipes.
“A lot of what I do in writing is telling these non-sequitur stories. Kind of making a case for (the recipes) touching on subject matter,” said Currence. “That’s really what food is. Or you get to that point in your career when you realize that if you’re really cooking from the heart, you’re telling stories through your food anyway.”
“Big Bad Breakfast” was released Tuesday and Currence will be taking the book on a tour across the United States until November.
