Frida Kahlo's smoked salmon bagel
The good-appetite breakfast that still keeps every rule
Scales up bagel for bagel. Toast them in batches rather than crowding the toaster or the grill.
This is the breakfast to reach for on a day that can take a little chewing, and it needs almost nothing done to it. A plain white bagel split and toasted, a thick layer of plain cream cheese while it is still warm, folds of smoked salmon laid over loosely, and a squeeze of lemon juice to finish. The usual furniture of this plate, capers, red onion, dill, a grind of pepper, all disappear without the dish suffering for it, because the salmon and the cream cheese were always doing the real work. What is left is clean and rich at once, and it carries a serious amount of protein for very little effort.
From the chronicle · Coyoacán, 1955
The woman who had cooked at the Casa Azul fed me through the spring of 1955, because I was a young doctor from the Hospital General on an allergy ward's wages, with a habit of photographing tourists in the Alameda when the wages ran out. She had kept the kitchen on for Rivera after the funeral and she talked about the year before as if it were still going on. Kahlo had spent most of it in bed, in a plaster corset, with the door open so she could hear the kitchen. Long months lying down, and the medicines that go with them, take the appetite and slow the bowel, and the cook had learnt by trial what would go down. Bagels came across the city from a Jewish bakery, always the plain ones, and she toasted them and spread the cheese while the bread was still hot enough to take it, so the whole thing had softened before the salmon went on. The capers stayed in their jar. Kahlo wanted them, the cook said, and was told no, and it was not a house in which many people told her that.
The people, places and dates are real. The meal and the conversation are not. Read more about the chronicle.
Ingredients
Contains: Gluten, Milk, Fish
- 1white bagel, plain, no seeds, split in half
- 40 gcream cheese, thick and plain
- 60 gsmoked salmon
- 1 tsplemon juice
Method
Toast the bagel halves, cut side up, until the cut faces are golden and the edges have crisped.
Spread the cream cheese thickly over each half while the bagel is still warm, so it softens slightly into the crumb.
Lay the smoked salmon over one half in loose folds rather than a flat sheet.
Squeeze over the lemon juice and close the bagel, or eat it open-faced with a knife and fork if that is easier.
Watch-points
- Choose a plain white bagel with nothing baked into the crust. A seeded or wholemeal one is off the list.
- Use only the juice of the lemon, never the zest or a wedge with pith still attached.
- Leave out the capers, red onion and dill that usually go with smoked salmon. Skins, seeds and raw onion are all things this diet avoids.
Stoma note: The bagel firms up output in the same way a slice of white toast does. Chew it thoroughly. A bagel is chewier than ordinary bread, which is why this one is for a settled day rather than the first weeks after surgery.
Make it more nourishing
- Use a thicker layer of cream cheese, nearer 60 g than 40.
- Add an extra 20 g of smoked salmon for more protein without more volume.
- Spread 10 g of butter over the warm bagel before the cream cheese goes on.
Swaps
- Instead of smoked salmon, use tinned salmon with the skin and bones removed
- milder and easier going on some days, and it still counts toward protein
- Instead of white bagel, use thick white toast
- for a morning when a bagel feels like too much chewing
The foods in this recipe
Each of these has a page of its own, with how to prepare it and where hospitals differ.