I would call it “bacon” because I always have a bacon & egg McMuffin. But if I had to endure what is normally called an “egg McMuffin”, I would definitely call that slab of meat in it “ham”. It absolutely is not “back bacon”.
You and I go to different diners. It’s possible it’s more a regional thing.
I have no doubt that if they made it for lunch or dinner and I asked for it for breakfast, they would (usually with an eye-roll) serve it to me, but it wasn’t on the breakfast menu. Admittedly, I might have missed it since I would never look for it, but I will keep an eye out in the future and report back.
What do you think those chunks of sausage in the gravy are made of?
Eggs, obviously.
Hot cereal is a standard part of my Southern breakfast.
A small bowl of Oatmeal or Cream of Wheat with the eggs and bacon.
Arkansas is too far West for grits. You find them in Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina etc.
I like Grits but the best I ever ate was in Georgia.
Can you find Grits or Oatmeal in Canada?
Forget the chicken fried steak, just go for the New York strip breakfast. My wife has ordered it a time or two. As much as I like steak it ain’t breakfast to me. I often like a sweet breakfast so pie or cake is just fine by me. I like plenty of pies including banana cream and French silk but those aren’t for breakfast. You need a good, solid fruit filling. I had some red raspberry pie last week that was amazing.
Okay, I will concede that biscuits and gravy are also a southern breakfast staple and do not involve eggs. I don’t get them often and they slipped my mind. Mea culpa.
No. I dearly love eggs on horseback, but that’s an import.
The southern breakfast was made of items that were easily available from the family farm, your neighbor’s farm, or the local country store. Eggs (everybody had chickens), some form of pork (sausage, ham, bacon - most people who had any decent size property had pigs), grits (everybody grew corn), and flour (which you bought at the store, but had multiple uses). You would probably either have a milk cow or access to a local dairy, but actual beef was a luxury item. Look at old timey Southern recipes, very little beef in there - it’s mostly chicken and pig.
This is probably true of most cuisines - it is oriented around what they could easily get their hands on. There’s a reason that Cajun cooking doesn’t include tomatoes (as a general rule) while Creole cooking does.
Getting back to the OP’s question, English cultural influence is not nearly as strong in Canada as it is in the other countries in the British isles. It’s been a long time since we had major immigration from England (mainly back in the 19th century), plus we’ve always had strong cultural influences from the US that is not the case with other Commonwealth countries. After all, two of our provinces were founded by political refugees from the US, who brought a lot of American culture (and dialects) with them, although opposition to American political ideologies.
I don’t think there is any equivalent to “full English breakfast” as a cultural thing in Canada, and poutine doesn’t cut it; it’s a relatively new phenomenon, invented in Quebec. (I’ve never had any.) Plus strong regional variants between the different provinces reduces the chances of something that is generally seen as a menu item for all of Canada.
Oatmeal is a staple, grits are very uncommon.
I don’t even know what grits are.
I was raised knowing that it was porridge. “Oatmeal” is one of those new-fangled terms that have crept across the 49th.
It might be the Ontarian in me, but I think of Red River as porridge and not Oatmeal.
”Get them in you boy. Do you good!”
Still don’t know what they are.
Dried hominy corn, brought back by soaking and boiling, made palatable with the inclusion of butter, honey, cheese, shrimp, etc.
Grits are to corn what lutefisk is to cod, or jerky is to beef
And hominy corn is …?
Also, grits are somewhat related to polenta, and from a texture standpoint, sort of like a less-smooth farina (a.k.a. Cream of Wheat).
Basically, a porridge made from corn.
The Quaker Hot Cereal variety pack was a staple of my childhood (Apple & Cinnamon, Raisin & Spice, Maple & Brown Sugar). We never had oatmeal from scratch in our house, though.
Mom making porridge on cold school mornings is what I grew up with. Brown sugar and milk (only rarely with salt). None of them fancy “flavours”.
Nixtamalized corn.
I think the first time I encounterd “oatmeal” as meaning “porridge” was in a PG Wodehouse novel, when a US senator used his spoon as a catapault to reject “oatmeal”, targetting his valet.