Tuesday 27 July 2010

The American Breakfast

Most of the hotels we've stayed in have provided some kind of breakfast as part of the charge for the room but these vary enormously.  Top of the range is the "full American breakfast".  The luxury version of this provides waitress service and turns into a kind of culinary multiple choice test.  Bacon or sausage; scrambled eggs or omelette (often you can't tell the difference), or sunnyside up, or overeasy; wheat toast or rye or sour bread? (Pete Mc please note that I used semi-colons in that sentence). These questions come so quickly and you feel so pressurised that you order the first thing that comes into your head rather than what you would prefer to eat.

At the other end of the scale is the "Continental breakfast"  (I'm not sure which continent this refers to).  You help yourself and it usually consists of a selection of  bread and bagels, both of which can be toasted, butter, jam and a few pastries, maybe some apples and oranges.

In between these two extremes is the "hot breakfast" or "luxury continental".  This can include a buffet of scrambled egg (see note above), sausage patties and hash browns, or a waffle maker, but it invariably involves biscuits and gravy.  Here is the perfect example of Churchill's "Two nations divided by a common language".  The biscuits are a kind of soft scone and the gravy is a thick (usually mushroom) sauce.  You get used to it!

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