Libby Inglis wrote:
. . . what is a typical breakfast in America? like the
way that bacon and eggs are 'typical' of Britain.?
Bacon and eggs are also typical here. But it's streaky
bacon. Unless you order "Canadian bacon". And the toast is
served warm -- and soggy, if you order it in a restaurant
and don't get really, really energetic about insisting that
they not soak it with melted margarine before bringing it
out. (Order "dry toast".)
Breakfast depends on who you are and where you are -- if you
are a hard-working Midwest farmer, "biscuits and gravy" are
an excellent breakfast. Biscuits, of course, are
unsweetened scones, and gravy is meat -- usually sausage --
in a white sauce.
(I learned just recently that in Britain the word "gravy" is
reserved for the vile concoction that's dyed dark brown with
caramel. Though I must confess that the dark-brown gravy
that Penguin Point (a local fast-food chain that also does
catering) served with the fried chicken at a Christmas
Dinner I attended was good -- even though it *looked* like
Gravy Master, it tasted like chicken gravy.)
Dried-beef gravy on toast is also good, but don't touch
"creamed chipped beef" with a ten-foot pole. For "creamed
chipped beef" they soak all the flavor out of the beef and
then put in away too much, so you get a mouthful of dry
fibers coated with bland gravy.
I think that fried mush is extinct -- *nobody* works that
hard any more. Mom would cook corn-meal mush to serve as
hot cereal for one breakfast, and make enough to have
left-overs to pack into a mold the length and width of an
ice-cube tray and twice as tall. For the next breakfast,
she'd turn out the loaf of mush, slice it about a quarter
inch thick, fry the slices in bacon grease, and serve them
with syrup like pancakes. (No butter!) Mom always served
caramel syrup that crystallized when cold, so she had to
devote a small saucepan to it. In these wealthier days, I
use nothing but real maple syrup -- when I'm allowed sugar
-- and heat it in the microwave.
Pancakes are also typical -- an everyday meal in my father's
youth, a special treat now. I usually order waffles at a
restaurant, because I can't make them at home. Or an
omelet, though they always put in too many eggs. (I never
eat more than one egg at a sitting when cooking for myself.)
Restaurant pancakes are seldom fit to eat, as they make
them from cake flour instead of bread flour, so they are
nothing but a structure to hold the syrup in place.
Grandmother invented the Silver Dollar Pancake when the boys
at Daddy's school took to bragging about how many pancakes
they had eaten for breakfast. She didn't get any credit for
it when Silver Dollar Pancakes enjoyed a brief vogue a few
decades after her death -- she didn't invent the name
"Silver Dollar", and that was the marketable part. (Not to
mention that the fad makers had never heard of Grandma.)
The now-extinct silver dollar was a large coin. Surviving
examples are worth five or ten times face value as junk
metal. I've forgotten what the merits of a pancake the size
of a large coin were supposed to be.
--
Joy Beeson
http://joybeeson.home.comcast.net/
http://roughsewing.home.comcast.net/
http://n3f.home.comcast.net/ -- Writers' Exchange
west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A.
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