c/o weswings.com

A Breakfast Pail from WesWings, the school’s on-site non-alcoholic dive bar, is hardly a perfect dish. For starters, the ratio is all wrong. Assuming you order it with eggs and sausage like I do, that protein matter is still only a quarter of your total pail, maybe a third if you’re lucky. The rest is hash browns. And those hash browns? You better believe they’re all the way at the bottom. And dry as a bone. The cheese on top is almost an insult: barely melted and good for not much more than slowing you down, loading you up with lactose before you’ve even gotten started. But it is, at its core, a pail filled to the brim with breakfast, and that’s tough to beat.

An amateur might go in fork first, casting aside any notions of strategy and simply trying to eat the entire pail as fast as possible. Hunger or perhaps pride drives this fool, and as a result, he gets a sore tummy within minutes. My first few times at brunch at Swings as a first year, I was such a fool. 

If you just barrel ahead, eating top-down like a berserker, you’re gonna get bogged down at best. It’s a law of nature. You’re hungry enough from the weekend of revelry (Woah, it’s way more fun going out to parties with people that didn’t know you in ninth grade!) that you coast through the eggs and sausage no problem but get lost in the Sahara desert of hash browns. It’s just too many hash browns. If you load up on ketchup you might stand a chance, but then you also run the risk of going too far beyond the pail and ending up with a damp soup of a breakfast. Worst case scenario, by some miracle of determination you make it through the entire monstrosity and end up sick to your stomach for the next few hours, even though it’s crunch time and you need to be writing the first long research paper in your entire scholastic career. If you’re anything like me, you’ve never even heard of Chicago Style citations, let alone how to trick Google Docs into formatting your assignments correctly. You don’t want to have to figure that out right when your stomach is figuring out what to do with a bucketful of breakfast. 

By sophomore year, I’d learned. Mixing is key. Before taking my first bite, I’d stir the pail. The ratio will never be ideal, but you can get a more reasonable mixture with each bite this way. A smidge of ketchup and a dash of hot sauce will also come in handy, but I learned from one too many bouts of overcompensation turned indigestion last year: A little goes a long way. All things considered, I thought I was wise. I had a girlfriend, she was great, and we had just pulled off a long distance relationship all summer, something they said couldn’t be done. I made my own rules, my own guidelines for living, and they seemed to be working. 

Sophomores enter the year with a breed of confidence unmatched even by seniors crossing the stage in their caps and gowns. I’d done it all once, and I thought I knew the mistakes. So even though I mixed my pail up, remembering all the times I’d botched things the year before, I didn’t realize I still had so much left to learn. I still had a stomachache, and I wasn’t all that much better than I was as a first year. I just knew how to cite my sources. 

Junior year, I wasn’t as brazen as I was sophomore year. I didn’t have tons of new friends and most of my old ones were abroad. I wasn’t in a relationship with the love of my life—I had been dumped.

I got brunch most weekends with another lonely friend who had been burned badly by breakfast pails during his first few months at Wes two years earlier. I mixed, measured out my ketchup carefully for the best ratio, and ate slowly. All around me I’d see first years holding their stomachs, sophomores laughing at them and still getting it wrong themselves. Carefully, with not much else to do, I perfected my strategy. Junior year, I figured out what I wanted, what my priorities were. I learned a lot about pails and other things that fall, and I learned even more when everyone came back to campus. 

But it was only as a senior, with three years of trial and error under my belt, that I really mastered the pail. I thought I had figured it out as a junior on those lonely September mornings with John, but in hindsight, I was just as naive as I always had been. I had the fundamentals, but I didn’t know how to implement them. Even if I got the recipe perfect, the combination of ketchup and hot sauce in their ideal proportions, and even if I stirred and mixed, the bottom was still soaked by the time I got to it. It’s a paradox, really. The universe’s ultimate sick joke. Either you eat the meal too slow and have nothing but a soggy disaster left for you in the bottom few inches, or you speed through it and end up crouched over a toilet in the library. It’s a Kobayashi Maru, a no-win scenario. Or so I thought. 

Here is how you eat a breakfast pail from Swings:

Order it with an egg over easy (the yolk will break, an enormous favor) and sausage.

Fill a small dish with ketchup and hot sauce to your heat preference. Choose Mike’s Hot Sauce instead of Sriracha. There is a time and place for Sriracha. This is not the time nor the place. 

Mix up your pail thoroughly but do not add the sauce you just created. Patience is a virtue in all things. 

With each bite, dip it just slightly into your new dipping sauce. This preserves the golden ratio of moistness, without the ticking time bomb of the whole dish drowning slowly if you don’t eat it in time. Make a forkful, dip, eat. Rinse and repeat.

Nate Krieger can be reached at nkrieger@wesleyan.edu.