“I cooked a simple breakfast of omelet and toast,” says the main character of a historic novel I recently read, in a throwaway half sentence. A simple breakfast. Of omelet and toast. In a cottage in the backwoods of Ireland, in 1911. Wait, simple?

Let’s break this down, shall we.

In order to make an omelet (or omelette, depending on where you live), you need to, of course, crack eggs, and… Hold on, back up.

I, too, had a simple breakfast this morning of eggs and fresh-baked bread (yes, ...