In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novel Mort, Death takes a holiday and gets a job cooking in an Ankh-Morpork eatery. One of the things he cooks for breakfasts is “fried slice,” or fried bread. A-M generally stands for Britain . . . Do Brits eat fried slices of bread for breakfast? How does it compare with toast? What kind of bread is used? Do you fry it in butter, bacon grease, or what?
It’s a slice of white bread fried in the grease of the bacon-sausage-whatever you just cooked.
From this page:
mmmmm… drool… feel those arteries clog up! Nothing like a full English breakfast.
Inasmuch as we eat steak and kidney pie, which is to say some of us do occasionally, yes we do eat fried bread. It’s just any old slice of white bread, fried in oil or whatever kind of fat you find lying in the frying pan. If you’re going for the Full English Breakfast experience, you should probably include fried bread (and yes, black pudding if you’re serious about it. I’ve only dared try it once, but it was OK actually).
Personally I prefer toast. Fried bread is unpleasantly fatty and just feels nasty in the mouth.
When I was growing up, my dad made French toast sort of like this. He made some sort of batter (like a thin pancake batter - more than just an egg wash), then dipped the bread into that, then fried it. It kicked ass.
How is this any different than a donut? I mean, obviously, the bread is different and the donut has glazed toppings, but in principle, aren’t they pretty much the same?
My mom used to fry bread in butter and serve it with a bit of powdered sugar when I was little. It was a yummy treat after school.
My first thought was of Native American fry bread. This stuff is ubiquitous at powwows, and pretty good. It’s made with a simple leavened dough, formed into a disk about 6 inches across, and deep fried. Fry bread is chewier and has bigger bubbles than a donut, but they taste sort of similar.
This is what I came in to comment on. I like fry bread.
It is definitely something you’d get for breakfast at the sort of greasy-spoon place Death gets a job at. Bacon eggs and fried bread is a pretty standard café* breakfast, use the bread to mop up your egg yolks.
*pronounced - caff
Those who’ve read “Angela’s Ashes” will recall how Frank McCourt described tea and fried bread as a typical supper.
Actually, to him, it was an IDEAL supper, as his drunken father often left them with insufficient funds even for that.
My mother made both fried bread and fried bread dough. The joys of growing up in poverty.
Just to clarify, it’s not a substitute for cereal or normal toast. It’s just that if you were for some reason* to break your fast** with a giant artery clogging fry-up, then fried bread is traditionally part of the package. I doubt that any very large proportion of the UK population eats it for breakfast on a regular basis.
*Reasons may be, but are not limited to, being hungover and/or being about to embark on a long day of manual labour on a building site or similar.
**Proper fryups are also traditionally available all day long. So you can have an all-day breakfast at 3 pm if you feel like it.
Al I could think of is Florence Henderson frying that big block of bread in the old Wesson Oil commercials – the only fried bread (outside of grilled cheese sandwiches) I’ve ever sen in the US.
Similar, but with fried bread, the dough’s already cooked before it’s hit the fat - more like “refrying” than anything else.
It can indeed be really greasy. The key is to have the fat just about smoking hot - a faint blue haze (any more and you are burning the fat). That should crisp up the surface before it absorbs too much grease.
@Annie-Xmas: A book on sailing I once read recommended fried bread spread with jam as a dessert, naming it “Poor Knights of Windsor”. It’s amazing what sticks after 35+ years. 
Mmm, my grandmother’s fried cornbread was wonderful. Non-self-rising cornmeal, salt and water. She must have fried it in lard or something, because I could never duplicate the taste I remember.
You don’t have to fry frybread; you can bake it as well. Tastes just as good, IMO, and better for you. When baked it’s more widely referred to as Bannock, although the fried version is sometimes called bannock as well.
Don’t you cut out a hole and drop an egg in too?
No no, that’s a ‘goldmine’.
I’m less familiar with England proper, but a (Northern Ireland) ‘Ulster Fry’ seems to consist of fried eggs, fried potatoes, fried slices of tomato, fried slices of bread with enough butter to leave toothmarks in, and baked beans. Very staying. And staying and staying, since apparently Northern Ireland has a staggeringly high percentage of people with heart disease.
IMO, fried bread with a fry-up has a specific role, which is as a tool to eat the runny yolk of the egg. Mmmmmmm…and there was me planning on salmon for lunch, dammit.