Love and McDonalds
By Vincent Leung
10 minute read
An English muffin, a sausage patty, and a disc-shaped egg.
That’s all there is to a Sausage and Egg McMuffin.
If you’re feeling fancy, you can add a hash brown, fried until it’s golden, to round out the symphony of a salty, slightly sweet, crunchy, chewy, fatty, tender and gob-smackingly delicious breakfast. And it was exactly what I looked forward to every week.
Food’s an important part of a migrant family. My parents were no exception. Without fail, after picking my sister and me up from Chinese school on Saturday morning, we’d go straight to yum cha for lunch with our grandparents in tow. Hot bamboo steamers would emerge from steam-filled kitchens and a cacophony of sounds would swirl around us, in Cantonese and Mandarin, as we dove into dumplings, baked goods, cheung fun and phoenix claws (also known as chicken feet).
Delicious.
If it wasn’t yumcha, we’d go to our local cha chaan teng (HK-style cafe) for a quick A or B set menu meal - $9.50 for a massive plate of noodles or rice, plus a drink. Two plates could feed the four of us, and my mum was immensely proud that we were saving money.
“See how cheap this is? They sell these for $11 at other places” she’d lecture us as we dug into the salt and pepper chicken ribs on rice, or pork chop with black bean sauce on spaghetti. “And you get a drink for free!” After lunch, they’d drop us off next to the butcher, and then split up to go hunting for bargains, finding the marginal increments of $1/kg saved here and there, crowing triumphantly over their purchases when they met up again.
If my sister or I curiously poked our heads into a cafe to look at their selection of brownies, or sandwiches, or focaccias, my parents would yank us away.
“Those are expensive. We already have those at home. We can make it for $5, why would I pay $10 for theirs?”
And so, McDonalds. Sunday morning, if we could get up early, our parents would consent to letting us go to the Happiest Place on Earth. To them, it meant 2-3 hours where they didn’t have to supervise us too closely and the holy grail of a cheap and tasty breakfast for fussy kids. To us, it was a secret infiltration of the white person, Australian breakfast - a subversion of the typical Chinese fare we would get at home. Dad would drive us all to Maccas and set up with a newspaper, and Mum would send us to find another newspaper for her from the surrounding tables. After finishing this quick task (who could say no to a cute Asian kid?), we’d eagerly run up to the counter to order our Sausage and Egg McMuffin, Bacon and Egg McMuffin (for my sister), and beg Mum to get us a hash brown or two along with them.
“*Sigh* so unhealthy!” A pause. “If you can tell me how much it will be all together, then maybe I’ll buy it for you”. And she usually did! Other days, maths was hard.
(Every opportunity is a learning opportunity - parents, pay attention.)
As we opened these warm, muffin-size packages, the sacred oath of a delicious breakfast wafted through the air. The crackle of the paper unwrapping created a Pavlovian reaction that is universal - our saliva glands working in overdrive to get ready for the meat and egg flavour bomb about to occur.
It’s all in the muffin, you know? The patty and the disc-shaped egg are the key foundations of flavour, but the muffin provides the crunch, the chew, and then hits you with an eldritch, supernatural seasoning on the outside that ties everything together in a way that reminds you of the warmest, softest bed you’ve ever slept in after a day in the cold, wet world. You had to savour every single bite. Often, I would unthinkingly take a gigantic bite in excitement, and then morosely take squirrel bites of the rest of the muffin to make sure I was eking out every morsel of satisfaction for my mouth. My sister was much more patient, slowly chewing through her muffin thoughtfully, making sure she was neatly eating through the disc of deliciousness.
Breakfasts have always been a point of contention in our family. I was never really hungry in the morning, but Mum would insist on us eating breakfast. We ate all manner of things, begrudgingly - porridge, cereal, toast - anything that was appealing and (sort of) healthy. She would be on our back every morning to have a hearty breakfast (usually eaten in the car on the way to school) and a big cup of milk. I hated having to devour something quickly when I wasn’t feeling hungry, while my sister was the master of surreptitiously hiding food in the car door, and disposing of it when she got to school. Later, I’d learn I was slightly lactose intolerant which explained why I had the shits every time I got to school in the morning.
After a particularly bad round of grumbling, Mum had the bright idea:
“You guys love Maccas. Why don’t we just try and make our own?” My sister and I just couldn’t believe that Mum would try and make something so...foreign. So not Chinese! Dad thought it would be easier, cheaper, and I mean...surely we could make it better, right?
Oh how wrong we were.
For our first week of experiments, we went to the supermarket and bought ingredients. An English muffin, some normal beef patties (“Who knows what they put in sausages! Let’s get the healthier version”), egg and some plastic squares of Kraft cheese. When putting it together, Mum tried to keep the egg in a disc shape, but instead ended up scrambling them instead. The cheese didn’t melt, and we thought just eating the English muffin straight, like a bun, would be fine.
Not all experiments are successful the first time. We soldiered through some pretty terrible muffins, but there’s always room to learn, right?
The next week we tried it, Dad took over - toasted the muffins, got a new type of cheese (one of those actual cheese slices - Bega, or Coon. I forget), and still scrambled the eggs. It was closer, but the kids were still complaining. Ungrateful bastards.
Our gamechanger was when Dad found a little disc-shaped mould to crack the egg into, that would help keep it together. Progress was made - it even looked the part! But taste-wise, we were repeatedly disappointed, and we were never able to conquer the lofty heights of the McMuffin. There was just some extra, elusive element the Maccas muffins had that we couldn’t work out.
Can you believe the effort?! I didn’t realise it at the time, but my parents would wake up early just to try and recreate this dish, every day for nearly a month, to make us happy. Giving us some milk and making us cereal wasn’t good enough - they wanted to make sure their kids got the best they could give. They weren’t always effusive with praise or encouragement, but as parents, that was the way they knew how to show their love. And hey, this wasn’t the only dish they tried recreating! It was like we had our own Claire from the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen trying to recreate fun snacks and treats for us kids.
Their sacrifice only became clear to me recently. They had to wake up extremely early because they had full-time jobs, and we were both sent to private schools. That meant they had to drop us off, before getting to work on time, and then coming back out to pick us up on the way home. Our job was to be educated, their job was to make sure we could focus on being educated. On weekdays, it was their responsibility to make sure we were cajoled and bribed into eating breakfast, so that we’d have energy for the day. Saturdays were a way to indulge their comfort foods - yum cha and cha chaan tengs - memories of a youth passed in a country far far away. Sunday mornings were times they could relax, and give the kids a special meal for the week. A ritual of delicious, cheap, easy food.
For my parents, food was love. The sacrifices they made weren’t sacrifices to them - a parent’s duty is to make food, brew medicinal Chinese soups, and make McMuffins so that the kids eat breakfast. They pushed themselves to cook in unfamiliar cuisines so that we might have a better life, they weathered our complaining and griping for years, and pushed us to be our best selves.
Love isn’t just words. You can say just as much with your time and your efforts, your service and your strength, your selflessness and your sacrifice. They’ll know, some day.
In the end, we kept going back to Maccas.
An English muffin, a sausage patty, and a disc-shaped egg.
What’s so hard about that?
