It started with a flash of insight like a thunderbolt in a snow storm, the sort of insight that can only be induced by high altitude hypoxia and making breakfast.
“Breakfast is a vector space. You can place pancakes, crepes, and scrambled eggs on a simplex where the variables are the ratios between milk, eggs, and flour. We have explored too little of this manifold. More breakfasts can exist than we have known.”
Like all such hypoxia-addled-brain thoughts, it was a successful tweet.
I stood in the kitchen paralyzed by indecision. The mixing bowl was in front of me, the milk, eggs, and flour next to it, all of them individually as familiar as they had been a moment before, but now the possibilities for their combination were just too great. Breakfast was now an alien fractal intruding on our world like the lighthouse at the end of Annihilation. The thoughts came unbidden.
“In the manifold of breakfast, are there empty subspaces? Might there be breakfasts that no one has ever had? With a theoretical model of breakfast, can we derive the existence of ‘dark breakfasts,’ breakfasts that we know must exist, but have never observed?”
The curtain of reality had pulled back for me, and I could no longer pretend to be ignorant of these eldritch possibilities. I furiously began to map the known breakfasts. If the dark breakfast exists, I must be able to find it in the interstices of the normal familiar world.
First I mapped all that I could recall from memory, pancakes, crepes, waffles, scrambled eggs, popovers, omelettes, and on and on, scouring my brain for every fast I had ever broken. The beginnings of the contours of breakfast began to reveal themselves. A gaping hole stared back at me, but I couldn’t yet be sure. I had to search the dark corners of the world to see if somewhere in far off lands that abyss had yet been filled. I called upon friendly ghosts. I paged through ancient tomes. I added kaiserschmarrn, swedish pancakes, dan bing, madeleines, crumpets, clafoutis, blinis, pannu kakku, parathas, nalesniki. The map filled in bit by bit, but it was no use. The gap in the fabric of breakfast remained.
I searched for benign explanations. Could it be that milk is simply too heavy, and that by including the weight of the water content that boils off I am tilting the simplex too far in its direction? Could it be that by excluding slices of bread as ingredients since they aren’t raw flour and do not go in a mixing bowl, I have excluded breakfasts like french toast, eggs in a basket, breakfast burritos, and breakfast sandwiches that might yet have saved us? Could I have overlooked some arcane culture that breaks their fast with dumplings or egg noodles? None of these satisfied me. The Abyss stared back.
The breakfasts I was able to identify cluster into three major regions:
- The Pancake Local Group: Here are found most of the conventional breakfasts, pancakes, crepes, waffles, and all of their international variants. Space here is chaotic, fractal. Any slight deviation from your recipe in this region is likely to produce something else entirely. Breakfast here is metastable at best. (prior research on the pancake cluster)
- The Baked Good Quadrant: The items here are only breakfasts by convention. Any of them could be served at other meals, and often are.
- The Egg Singularity and Custard Accretion Disk: While only omelettes are labelled for brevity, there are dozens of named dishes that could be stacked on top of the pure egg point, over easy, sunny side up, hard boiled, soft boiled, etc. From these a small tail of egg based dishes sneaks down the right side, each with some amount of milk added, often a variable or optional amount.
I was days into my research before I finally found a clue. In an obscure document on the website of the International House of Pancakes Corporation there was a hint that the dark breakfast had been made. IHOP omelettes include pancake batter. While I cannot place IHOP omelettes exactly on the map, by interpolating between pancakes and omelettes, we can bound where they must occur, and confirm that the manifold possibilities do indeed pass through the Dark Breakfast Abyss.
We do not know why the Dark Breakfast Abyss is empty. But by anthropic reasoning, we should conclude that it is empty for good reason. The International House of Pancakes is playing a dangerous game. If someday a remote IHOP splashes a little too much batter in their omelette, cooks the Forbidden Breakfast, and thereby brings about the end of the world, well, at least we know the Waffle House will be open.
For other breakfast scholars who wish to further my study, I offer my data and code. If you are so foolhardy that you wish to explore the bounds of dark breakfast yourself, the recipe is as follows:
Dark Breakfast
Ingredients:
- ¼ cup Milk
- 4 Eggs
- ½ cup Flour
Instructions: Unknown
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
H.P. Lovecraft – The Call of Cthulhu