British vs American cooked breakfasts

[Brentwood]

Wait...so no one's mentioned a Snickers bar and a Mountain Dew as the breakfast of champions?

[frogonmytoe]

American here, spent a semester in England.

The big differences:
- in the US, the options for breakfast are HUGE! Bagels, cereal, fruit, yogurt, pastries, egg sandwiches, omelets, pancakes, waffles, on and on and on. plus your meats & egg combos with hash browns or home fries, or skillet dishes.
- breakfast available out and at any hour. 24 hour diners are a specialty of my homestate, and yay for that

Love love love england. But I LOOOVE american breakfasts! I usually cook up a bigger one at least once on the weekend, eggs, toast or biscuits, bacon or sausage. during the week i don't really eat one.

[violinp]

Wait...so no one's mentioned a Snickers bar and a Mountain Dew as the breakfast of champions?

Hehe. I have a FiberOne bar and Simply Orange orange juice (that stuff tastes so much better than Tropicana).

[DuBois]

I'll have to try grits. They sound absolutely delicious! As for hash browns, I haven't had them because I'm not over fond of fried potatoes (weirdly, I like chips/french fries) so I prefer having the potato farls. The US certainly seems to have a wider variety of breakfast foods that we do!

[aventurine]

Wait...so no one's mentioned a Snickers bar and a Mountain Dew as the breakfast of champions?

Or cracklins and boudin, as I put on my FB page during a trip recently   

[hyzenthlay]

Here is the southwest the breakfast of choice is frequently a breakfast burrito 

Eggs, potatoes, cheese and chili in a tortilla.

Potatoes might be hash browns or pan fried. Chili is either red or green (hot sauce made from chili plants, NOT from bell peppers.) We usually substitute a hot salsa for the chili at home. And they usually contain either bacon, sausage or chorizo (a hot spicy sausage.) 

Blake's Lotaburger makes the best breakfast burritos.

[Brentwood]

My many recent visits to Texas have introduced me to the breakfast pleasure that is migas (eggs cooked with strips of fried tortillas, jalapenos, onions, tomatoes, cheese, and, for me, chorizo ).

[kitty-cat]

Wait...so no one's mentioned a Snickers bar and a Mountain Dew as the breakfast of champions?

A bottle of Coke and a pack of Twizzlers. Especially if you use the Twizzlers as a straw at the start of the bottle of soda.

Breakfast of the college student. (i can call anything breakfast though. i even had sushi for breakfast once- not one of my better ideas though)

On topic: When we actually make breakfast it is: pancakes, scrambled eggs, sausage (links and patties), bacon, fruit, juice, and coffee. There would be hashbrowns, but I don't know how to make em.

[LTrew]

I'm an American who has lived in the UK for a decade, and one thing I pine for is American breakfast sausage.  I've even tried making it  myself but just couldn't get the fat content right so it was all dry and wrong.

There is way more variety for breakfast in America, most places in the UK offer a variety of fry ups and maybe some pastries, porridge/oatmeal, fruit or cereal, but it is mostly fry ups.  What exactly is in the fry up is regional, a local farmshop/restaurant  here offers 2 sausages, 3 rashers bacon, 2 eggs, tomato, mushrooms, hogs pudding and sautéed potatoes - plus toast of course,  with all the meat coming from their own animals.  It is apparently wonderful but waaay too much food for me, and my husband is never able to get through it all.   

I miss being able to get pancakes, waffles, breakfast sandwiches, omelettes, breakfast tacos and burritos, ham and eggs (which you can get here, but not at breakfast) french toast, biscuits and gravy, bagels...

[Bethalize]

I was thinking about having brunch today and now I am going to. Scrambled egg, two rashers of dry-cured back bacon, Branston baked beans and a slice of fried bread. I even have dripping to fry the bread in! No potatoes to fry, or black pudding though.

ETA And jolly good it was too with a glass of orange juice. I didn't miss the spuds. I would have liked a tomato though.

[LTrew]

Also, I can eat baked beans for breakfast now, but it took some getting used to!  UK baked beans are more like pork and beans without the pork, but not at all like what I would consider baked beans to be.

Being given a plate with sausage, bacon, runny fried eggs, mushrooms, half a tomato and a big mess of baked beans in the middle was a shock to the system when I first moved here!

At the same time English people I've talked to have been horrified to be given a plate with American bacon (which I agree is not very nice) eggs, etc. and pancakes with syrup on the same plate.  They don't really do the salty/sweet combo here.

[iridaceae]

Wait...so no one's mentioned a Snickers bar and a Mountain Dew as the breakfast of champions?

A bottle of Coke and a pack of Twizzlers. Especially if you use the Twizzlers as a straw at the start of the bottle of soda.

Breakfast of the college student. (i can call anything breakfast though. i even had sushi for breakfast once- not one of my better ideas though)

Nah; you're not hard-core enough. My breakfast as a university student was Mountain Dew and a package of Suzie-Qs.

******

If I'm going to have a formal breakfast- like when I'm on vacation- it's usually eggs over medium, toast, hash browns, and milk.

[mechtilde]

American here, spent a semester in England.

The big differences:
- in the US, the options for breakfast are HUGE!

That used to be the case in Britain too- in the Edwardian period, if you had breakfast at a well-off household there would be a variety of chafing dishes on the sideboard - not just bacon and eggs but kidneys, kippers, and a variety of other things- including eggs done several ways. Plus porridge. And Prunes.

It sort of died out after WW1 when people didn't have so many servants. There wasn't really much variety in places serving food either- it tended to be variations on the same "Full English" theme.

Although very few people eat cooked breakfasts every day, and eat cereal or toast, people do still love it as a treat. My Granny always cooked bacon for my Grandad though, and he often had porridge too.

[Diane AKA Traska]

For me, a good solid breakfast is the following:
- Eggs, either an omelet or sunny side up.  If having multiple items on this list, the eggs *have* to be sunny side up
- Bacon.  I prefer limp to crisp, if only because I find crisp bacon gets too acidic.
- Sausage.  Links or patties, but links are the standard.
- Hash browns or home fries.  I prefer home fries, but I can make frozen hash browns.   
- Toast, biscuits, or English muffins.  I vastly prefer biscuits, and I prefer what I call "biscuit bread", which is simply biscuits in a bread pan.  Mom started making them that way when she stopped feeling like making them drop style.
- Orange juice.  This is the ONLY non-negotiable item.  If there's no orange juice, it's not breakfast, it early lunch.

Other options, depending on mood, are cold cereal (I prefer bran flakes with dehydrated fruit), oatmeal (usually instant, usually apples/cinnamon or maple/brown sugar), or pancakes/waffles (if I'm in a sugar mood).  Some people eat French toast (that's bread dipped in egg batter and fried), but we don't talk about those people.

Oh, and despite Mom being from West Virginia, I've never gotten a taste for white gravy.

[wheeitsme]

At the same time English people I've talked to have been horrified to be given a plate with American bacon (which I agree is not very nice)

Heresy!!!!

I adore American bacon!

Imagine my suprise when I ordered a British breakfast that contained bacon and there was none there.  Just a weird piece of ham.  I have since learned to like a British breakfast, but that first one was an unhappy one.