When I lived in Germany, coffee and fresh-baked rolls, called Brotchen, were the usual breakfast fare. I preferred them just with butter, but hotels would provide a variety of spreads, and often soft-boiled eggs to accompany them. They were wonderful, not at all like the kaiser rolls we get around here. My friend told me that when she was a little girl she thought her dad was the best cook in the world, because he was the one who would go out to the bakery to bring back the fresh rolls for breakfast.
From New Jersey. I worked at a 7-11 store in Lawrenceville, near Trenton State College. Every morning, we’d get four dozen or so assorted bagels, and four dozen or so beautiful Kaiser rolls. Fresh from the bakery. I’d put a nice, 1/4" slab of cream cheese on the bagels, and a generous dollop of whipped butter on the rolls. They sell very well, and either go absolutely wonderfully with a cup of black coffee after a long graveyard shift on a crisp NJ winter morning.
They don’t do that out here in San Francisco. Bagels are ubiquitous, but not on the sheer scale of the NE. And no, they don’t do the buttered roll out here, not like that.
Joe
Well, I lived in NYC ( Washington Heights ) for a couple of years and all of this is new to me. 'course this was in the mid-1970’s when I was about six to seven, so maybe I have an out ;).
That said, despite my very young exposure I was indelibly imprinted on NYC-style pizza like a gosling on Konrad Lorenz.
Yes, this is exactly what I buttered every morning.
Well, if they’re from Bruegger’s, yes.
Oops, your umlaut fell off. Here, I have a spare you can have.
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Hell, they don’t even know who the Kaiser is.
( sorry. couldn’t resist. )
I’ve lived in NY since 1981. Yes, a regular coffee is a reasonable dash of milk and two quickly scooped/dumped teaspoons full of sugar. One proceeds with alterations from that assumption.
Joey Baggadonuts, ordering his morning bit: Gimme a buttered roll an’ regular coffee, heavy cream instead and extra sweet. ( 3-4 teaspoons fulla sugah )
I can understand why folks from away from here ( And by that I do mean Joisey as well as Points West, South and North-As Billy Joel said once during a concert, " I wanted to go far away, go west. Hell, I thought New Jersey was west !! " ) would glance askance when asked for a buttered roll. Here, the two words connote something very specific- as pointed out by Biggirl up there, you are asking someone behind the counter to take a serrated bread knife and slice a kaiser roll in half and butter both sides. ( some delis only do one side. I call bullshit. )
Tangential query not a hijack at all: When you sit down in a diner or restaurant and order your breakfast food, do you have to specify whether the toast is buttered or not? In most places here in NYC and surrounding environs, you will be served your toast dry with a small china dish of jellies and buttah pats. Outside of the NY area, I almost always get served toast already buttered. If I ask for it to be buttered, they will always oblige, but by default it seems to be served dry around here.
ETA: HRHomer, it does appear that Trenton is east of the rest of Jersey.
Your husband is a blessed man.
I’ve only met a few souls in my life who regard a very hot toasted bagel and a few pats of butter as the perfect base upon which to heap OTHER things. Used to wig my Ex Wife out to no end when I’d treat a sesame bagel as such before layering on the lox/cream cheese spread.
Heaven I tell ya. Heaven.
Come to think of it, lots of things used to wig my Ex out but that’s really for another thread !!
Just another (possibly useless) data point; I’ve lived all of my 45 years in New Jersey just across the river from Manhattan, and worked the last 20 or so in downtown Manhattan, and am very familiar with the buttered roll and regular coffee as described by Biggirl. I remember the same being true when I was child going to diner breakfasts with my dad (in Jersey), so perhaps the proximity to New York influenced the culture.
My husband puts jelly on onion bagels. Grosses me right the hell out.
Around here, unless you specify otherwise, your toast will arrive with some sort of yellow spread on it. It might be butter, but it’s probably margarine or some other disgusting spread attempting to do the job of noble butter.
But that makes sense, because a coffee with nothing in it is more logically termed “black.”
And just to add to the chorus on this one, in North America, the dish is called “fish and chips,” even though individually the fried potatos slices would be called “fries.” As a unit “fish and chips” is always the common term.
Wait - what do you call a cardigan then? Here we have jumpers/sweaters (v or crew neck), hoodies (any variety as long as it has a hood) and cardigans which have buttons or a zip up the front. (Dungarees here are jeans with a bib, but I can let that slide).
“Black and bitter.” Put sugar in it and it’s “black and sweet.” Put milk/cream in it and it’s “blonde and bitter.” Add both and it’s blonde and sweet."
With as much cattle as there is in Texas, I’m surprised you folks cannot rustle up a butter churn or two.
Would you rather use a buttery spread from this guy
We generally don’t distinguish between cardigans and other types of sweaters. They are all sweaters. We don’t tend to need them very much, so we don’t need to distinguish between them, or at least, little kids don’t. Jeans with a bib are called overalls, and if they are shorts with a bib, shortalls. Or at least, that’s the way it was the last time I paid any attention to the terminology.
Butter was demonized for a while, then margarine and other spreads were demonized for having transfatty acids. Just like eggs were considered to have too much cholesterol, and then they were marketed as “Nature’s perfect food” or some such. It’s just fads in what’s considered healthy. And, of course, spreads that aren’t butter are generally a lot cheaper. So restaurants serve some sort of yellow spread, and proclaim that it’s out of health concerns, when it’s usually more about financial concerns.
I never knew what a cardigan was until I moved AWAY from NJ to CA. We just called them sweaters, and I still do - pullover or button, it’s a sweater. Dungarees are just denim pants (jeans), Overalls are dungarees with a bib.
Edit : I never heard of a “hoodie” until I moved to CA - in NJ, they were just sweatshirts, or maybe hooded sweatshirts, although I have a feeling “hoodie” is standard.
From NE Pa., and I knew exactly what you meant. One of my pleasures when visiting family up there… because I’m usually the first one up… is to run to the grocery store and get a couple dozen hard rolls for breakfast. Providing you go to the correct store, there will be bins full of them for everyone wanting them as early as 7:00 AM.
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Lynn, you just triggered one of my pet peeves. The items you listed aren’t due to fads. There do to expanding our knowledge of food science and the effects on the body. Just as the first home computers weren’t ultra-slim Macbooks running OSX, food science constantly learns new facts. It wasn’t until we found out that saturated fats aren’t good and started replacing them with trans-fats that we started to find out what effects those trans fats had on the body. If we didn’t discover that saturated fats were bad, we might never have moved to trans fats en masse, and not had a large enough sample size to draw conclusions.
Now if you are talking about diets like Atkins and its ilk, or about the morning news telling you one morning how bad coffee is for you and next week telling you the benefits of a morning coffee, that’s a different story. The coffee usually comes from inconclusive studies, but they sound great on sound bites and get viewers attention.
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Also, most (if not all) of the restaurants and diners I visit serve butter, and if you want margarine you have to ask. My buttered rolls have butter (and it is real easy to taste the difference), even the prepared, wrapped ones.