Andy’s Southern Breakfast Companion

If I had any loyal readers, and if they were still reading after such a long break, they may have been wondering why there have been so few posts.

There are a number of reasons, amongst which are that I’ve actually been working hard (the pretty animation at the top of this news report is mine: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16657122) ; and that I’m incredibly lazy about writing. Primarily, though, it’s because we were travelling a lot, and in particular travelling in the South. Which means both lots of breakfasts out, and also lots of the specific foods of the American south.

Americans reading this will wonder why I’m bothering, but the people of Britain are often baffled by southern breakfast foods which sound, to the British ear, utterly nasty. Why would people eat grits, we wonder? It just sounds bad. What on earth would possess you to put gravy on your biscuits?

I hope I’ll be able to add just a little extra layer of information.

The Biscuit Confusion

Some biscuits, yesterday

First up are biscuits. Back in the UK, biscuits are cookies. On the whole, biscuits are dry cookies – perhaps the closest thing in the US are Graham crackers. The idea that you’d eat them for breakfast is a bit odd. The thought is putting fried chicken between them is baffling. And the concept of covering them with gravy really churns the stomach.

Here in the US, biscuits, which are now pretty universal but which started as a southern speciality, are bready, soft, buttery delights. The closest UK equivalent is the scone, I’d say. But it’s a scone that’s not sweet, and which is lighter and made with much more butter (as well as with buttermilk rather as the base). Frankly, the best biscuits are made mostly with butter, with just a thin fabric of flour holding them together. Eaten warm, they melt in the mouth and are utterly wonderful.

These days, as I mentioned above, they’re getting to be ubiquitous – you can get them in fast food restaurants, in KFC and McDonalds and the rest, and if there’s any justice in the world you’ll be getting them in the UK soon  - but traditionally they were eaten in the south with gravy. The gravy here is not the dark, beefy, Bisto kind of gravy we’re familiar with in the UK. It’s much lighter, basically a white gravy, made with a flour base, and ladled over the biscuits to soak them. Now, this can be a bit more of an acquired taste, particularly as the gravy is often made with sausage meat and then given a bit of spice. Personally, I find it pretty delicious, but it is a very fatty gravy, and not to everyone’s taste.

Grits

Uncooked, unappetising, grits

For Christmas, Beth bought me the selection box of grits from Quaker. It is appropriate that they’re made by Quaker because porridge really is the obvious comparison. Grits are best described as a corn meal porridge. It’s a fairly coarsely ground corn meal heated in milk (or water, I think, for the purists), and comes out with a vaguely gritty, crunchy texture - a bit like slightly undercooked rice.

Beth reminds me that perhaps the other really close comparison is polenta. Grits are very similar to polenta.

The flavour is pretty bland on its own, although like biscuits they becomes a good vessel for carrying butter to the mouth. This means that plain grits appear to be all about the texture which – like sausage gravy - appears to be pretty polarising – some love the texture, some really hate it, although oddly I find myself a bit indifferent, really. The Quaker variety pack comes with pre-flavoured grits, though – some plain, some butter, some cheese and some bacon. I’ve not yet dared to try the bacon after the astonishingly nasty fake-cheese flavour on the cheddar version, which I’d really suggest that all sane people avoid.  They’d probably be great with real cheese, mind you. The pre-flavoured butter ones work well, so I guess it’s just a case of making sure you get the right fake flavours.

Cooked, still rather charmless, grits

Beth tells me a sort-of-entertaining story from 1990s southern Africa. Grits are made with ground yellow corn, and the mealie-pap that is common across southern Africa is ground white corn. During a period of famine, US charities sent large amounts of grits as aid but because they were the wrong colour apparently they were turned down, under the suspicion that the US government was messing with it and trying to kill them.

Hoecakes

Another food item that would have bad connotations to the English, this is not actually anything to do with prostitutes. I have learned that the Hoecake is actually identical to the Johnnycake and is not a southern speciality at all. It’s just that the term Hoecake is a southern usage. It appears that they start off fairly similar to grits, as corn-meal, but are then cooked on a griddle.

Traditionally, in the south, they were cooked on hoes in the farms, which is how they got their name.

Ho, ho, hoecakes

We only had them one evening, at Paula Deen’s restaurant in Savannah, so I’m not sure they’re actually a breakfast food.  They were very delicious, and certainly taste like they should be breakfast food. Fried and cornbready and delicious and probably wonderful with butter and maple syrup.

Again for the British readers, a few words on Paula Deen: she is a pretty ubiquitous TV chef who’s schtick appears to be “add lots and lots of butter and sugar to everything, and that will make it delicious, y’all”, which is an entirely fair point, but seems a little shallow to have built an entire culinary empire on. Then again, Jamie Oliver has built an empire on “buy really good fresh ingredients, and then don’t cook them too long, and they’ll taste great”, so perhaps the public need spokespeople for the blindingly obvious. Miss Deen, meanwhile, recently announced that she has diabetes, which some view as ironic. More ironic, perhaps, is that I think I heard she’s now a spokesperson for a diabetes drug: given that she has spent her career encouraging people to eat a diabetes inducing diet. If this were politics, someone might call “conflict of interest”.

Beignets

Finally, something that doesn’t sound nasty to British ears, these are a speciality of New Orleans. Like the French suggests, they’re basically doughnuts, but in New Orleans, they’re fried, square pillows of dough, very, very light and smothered in powdered sugar. And like most of the other things I’ve mentioned, utterly delicious – although they’re served with the very disturbing chickory coffee that seems popular in New Orleans, too, which brings them down a notch.

A word on bacon

This is just another note to British in America, and not a specifically southern thing. You can’t get back bacon here. Don’t bother trying. All bacon in America is streaky bacon (which is also delicious, and generally cooked until it’s very crunchy). They might try and tell you that Canadian bacon is back bacon, but it’s not. Canadian bacon is perhaps more similar to ham than to back bacon. It’s closer than streaky, but it’s definitely not the real thing.  So, Britons in America, I suggest you just embrace the lovely, crunchy, thin streaky bacon of the US when you’re here, be a bit sad that you’ve lost all the great bacon variety that you’re used to, and enjoy back bacon when you’re in Blighty.

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Well, after all that, it’s time to get back to the regular programming and some writing on immensely sugary American breakfast cereals because the drive across the country seems to have shrunk the waistband on all my clothes and I need to start the fightback.