I just stumbled across this video of Americans trying an English breakfast for the first time.
As it happens, it was recorded at Ye Olde King’s Head in Santa Monica, CA, and I’ve actually had their English breakfast.
My take: I’m not a huge fan of grilled (i.e., uncoated fried) tomatoes. They’re all right, and I eat them; but I can take them or leave them. Pretty much the same for the mushrooms. I mean, there’s so much other good stuff, why have the vegetables? The bangers are great. So’s the bacon. The blood pudding is good, but not as good as the bangers. I might actually have some baked beans for breakfast tomorrow. They’re not imported Heinz (the local supermarket carries the Heinz), but look: They’re baked beans. Fried bread? Yes, please. I made some last week. Eggs? Eggs are eggs.
In the video, the tasters were asked whether the U.S. or England had the better breakfast. Hard to say. The Brits have a nice variety going. On the other hand, I fond of potatoes with breakfast. Chicken-fried steak with gravy and a couple of eggs and hashbrown potatoes. Bacon and eggs and hashbrown potatoes. A fry-up of bacon, diced potatoes (cooked in the bacon grease, of course), and onion with a couple of eggs cracked on top and steamed to runny goodness. I’ll gladly eat an English breakfast, but I’ll have to give the nod to the U.S. And besides, we have Tabasco.
Breakfast at Ye Olde King’s Head? Last time I had breakfast there, it was late enough for the curry.
Incidentally, there are now many dozens of videos like this on Youtube, each of which has citizens of X country trying the meal/snack/dessert/candy/etc. of Y country.
Looks like an American english breakfast. That’s why you weigh so much.
The English I knew had baked beans OR mushrooms OR sangers OR grilled tomotoes. Maybe tomatoes AND sangers if they were being flash.
Had “American” breakfast (pancakes, eggs, sausage etc) in a hotel in Singapore recently. It was good, and I appreciated it, and the weather outside was warm and humid, but… cold American breakfast???
In a English hotel, you would be offered all of those things for breakfast. I presume that at home most English people would only eat a subset of them for breakfast. For that matter, I suspect that at home most English people most days would have just something much simpler like a bowl of cereal. The same is true of that American breakfast you had at a hotel. Most Americans most days would just have something simple like cereal.
I’m not sure why you’re talking about “sangers.” I had to look this up, but it’s apparently an Australian slang word for sandwiches. There are no sandwiches in the breakfasts in that video. There are bangers, which are sausages.
When I was in England, breakfast was a banger, toast, a soft-boiled egg, and a bowl of porridge. I had to go home to get a ‘Traditional English Breakfast’
Yes, very much so, throughout the British Isles. A traditional full English or Scottish or Welsh or Irish breakfast tends to be an occasional thing. It’s a tremendous hangover cure, for one thing.
If I were served a *cold *American breakfast (pancakes, eggs, sausage, bacon) in a hotel, I’d send it back. Anything fresh off the griddle should be hot.
I like having a British full breakfast three or four times a year. There’s a bakery in Toronto where I can get black pudding, Irish sausages, Scottish bacon, potato scones, and so on.
The problem is, the damned things are so filling I can only eat about a quarter of one at a sitting. So I’m not only set for all day Sunday, but have leftovers for Monday as well.
I suspect the only people who still eat full breakfasts regularly are farmers and other hardworking folk who need to chow down first thing in the morning.
The only time I’ll have a full breakfast is when I’m doing big hikes. I’ve just come back from a walking holiday in the Lake District and we made some formidable breakfasts using local produce (except for the haggis slices, which were caught just over the border). Even so, we couldn’t face it every morning.
I had a Full English a couple of times during a recent London trip. The big city folks give you a sausage and 2-3 rashers as the meat part. It was only in Scotland and Ireland that I was offered white and black puddings.
I love the grilled tomatoes and mushrooms, I have to say. You scoop up their juices on the toast along with the bacon grease and egg yolk.
No one in Great Britain or Eire has ever given me any beans for breakfast.
There’s a thread I started about ten years back asking how to cook an English breakfast. As it turns out, British bacon, bangers, and black pudding are hard to come by in my neck of the woods unless you want to shell out for overnight shipping, so I’ve concocted my own “American English breakfast” that I cook from time to time when I want to spoil myself; a couple strips of American bacon, some Farmer John sausage links, two eggs overeasy fried in the bacon grease, a halved tomato fried in the bacon grease, a couple of sliced white mushrooms fried in same, a slice of white bread tossed into the pan at the end to soak up all the leftover grease, and a side of Van Camp’s pork & beans, with a hearty dollop of HP sauce (which I can purchase locally at a non-exorbitant price; one of the local grocery stores sells Heinz baked beans, but I’ll be damned if I’m paying $3 for a can.)
It hits the spot and usually leaves me too full to actually get up and do anything afterward.
Indeed, man. The SO likes me to cook big breakfasts on weekends. They make us lazy the rest of the day.
Looks like no beans for breakfast for me today. Though the SO is working, so am I. My employer insists I use my vacation time. But then I have to work weekends to catch up. (It would be so much better if we could still roll the time over into subsequent years!)
There are recipes for making British-style sausages available on the Internet. I’ve done it a couple of times; if you don’t have a casing machine, the ground meat can just be formed into patties and eaten that way. Seasoning is the thing.
Anybody ever had kippers with their full breakfast? The damned things are good, but oh-so-salty!
Haggis is lovely, like eating spicy liverwurst. But damn, it sits in your stomach all day long!
My normal breakfast is a mug of black coffee, a quart of juice, and a handful of aspirin first thing in the morning. A couple of hours later, I might have a bowl of cereal with 10% (or heavier) cream and fruit.
Today was unusual: I worked all night to meet a deadline and skipped my Friday evening meal. So after I got up at 17:00, I breakfasted on Polish sausage, sauerkraut, and potato salad. I’m now relaxing with a mug of coffee with 20% cream and brown sugar. :o (It’s 18:30 where I am right now.)
