what i've heard is that the tomatoes in a full English are a flex, they were put there to show that the household was rich enough to maintain greenhouses to have hothouse grown tomatoes out of season any time they wanted them
that makes a lot of sense to me, especially as it would be adopted by more people to look wealthy when british colonies could grow tomatoes and ship them there for relatively cheap.
@@davespiller684 Back bacon and Canadian bacon aren't exactly the same thing. Back bacon is from the loins, and it has an eye of meat with a fatty strip, whereas Canadian is the tenderloin and there's just an eye with virtually no fat
@@brettjohnson536 Well thank you for enlightening me. How bizarre. So they actually use the tenderloin for that? I take it they have normal bacon from the loin and belly? What do they call that?
As an American who did archeological work last summer in the Balearic Islands in Spain, the siesta is absolutely necessary for manual labor. The Mediterranean sun in July is unbearable to work in, we woke up at 5:45 so that we would be done by noon because some poor person would pass out from heatstroke if we didn’t. Adam, I think you’d like Modern History TV, he’s a TH-cam channel devoted the the Middle Ages, a topic I’ve noticed you referencing more and more as of late. It’s awesome to see someone discussing my favorite historical period, it warms a history major’s heart
Absolutely necessary is obviously relative. I am extremely jealous of siesta culture and wish we had it here but it absolutely gets way hotter in the American south and Midwest and we don’t a mid day break so it’s not really necessary. I’d fight to have a break like that tho
@@MrJahka It's a different kind of heat, more similar to the Southwest (there's a reason California was colonized by the Spanish). I can say that it was necessary for excavation, maybe not for some other jobs, it depends obviously on your own constitution and what work you're doing. There was a record heat wave last year in Europe so that may have contributed to it
@@nicholasricardo8443 I worked in a car wash in California. In all weather including the hottest days of the year. I then played basketball that same night. I am NOT Spanish. Nor do I have Spanish ancestors. Its all Celtic and Germanic. The reason the Spanish colonized California is because they had already colonized Mexico and killed any other Europeans they caught sailing in what they claimed as their waters. If said Brit did not kill the Spanish first, see Sir Francis Drake. You guys are just wimps that cannot stand the heat.
That "airfryers are just tabletop convection ovens" joke is funny until you fall for it and get a tabletop convection oven and learn it doesn't replace your airfryer in terms of crisping performance and speed.
I mean it literally is a table top convection oven it’s just hot air being moved across the food one just moves more air than the other. One has more optimized airflow but I’d venture to say there’s nothing really different about the principal mechanism behind them.
In England, "English Muffins" were simply called "muffins" until this was thrown into disarray when US-style muffins (aka cupcakes without icing) became popular here in the 90s. A crumpet is a totally different style of bread. If you haven't tried one, you're missing out!
So do the people of England still call the 'English Muffins" just muffins or do they need to specify it at times with the rise of US style muffins? And yeah, I never thought about it but US style muffins are indeed cupcakes without icing. In the US, saying muffins by itself with no other context means US style. All other types need to be specified such as "English Muffins". >A crumpet is a totally different style of bread. If you haven't tried one, you're missing out! We have them in the US. Not as popular as English Muffins though but you can find them in some stores. They are often confused with english muffins.
I have a chicken farm down the street from my house that sells stewing hens. I should get one. It’s an amazing farm, I’ve never seen such spoiled chickens, totally worth it. You drive up and they’re all just chillin outside. I like how when they’re really relaxed they just flatten themselves on the ground like little pancakes.
as a free range chicken owner, the pancake thing is definitely funny but also causes mild panic attacks when they pancake a little too long in a weird position and you think they're dead until you walk up to them and they finally wake up 😭
As a former Midwesterner, I'd consider something like a fried egg sandwich a lunch item. Egg salad as well is more lunch/picnic than breakfast. Almost all other egg applications are breakfast though.
I agree. Putting an egg on sandwich or burger is something that is for lunch not breakfast nor dinner. Sure, I'll eat it for dinner as well but it has more of a lunch / brunch vibe. But for the most part, adding eggs does make it more of a breakfast dish.
As a Torontonian I am well-versed in the history of Canadian Bacon! (AKA Peameal bacon as we call it). Toronto pork packer William Davies, who came to Canada from England in 1854, is credited with its development. The reason for wet-brining and curing the central loin cut of pork was because of the immense pork processing industry which took place in Toronto (This contributed to Toronto's longstanding nickname "Hogtown"). These centre-cut pork loins were very profitable traded goods and were sold en masse to larger cities like New York and Boston and across the ocean to the British Iles. And so to help preserve them for their long journey, they first were rolled with finely ground dried yellow peas (absorbing surface moisture) and then the more effective and palatable dried cornmeal, a process which still continues to this day. If you ever visit Toronto, Canada I highly recommend that you patronize the Carousel Bakery in the St. Lawrence Market, they are credited for serving up the the first and still the best Peameal Bacon Sandwiches!
Fun fact the 'stewing hen' in Chinese is 老母鸡 which literally translate to 'old female chicken' or 'senior hen'. It's also the ideal type chicken for stewing chicken soup in Chinese cooking.
The other day I had boxed Mac and cheese for dinner. I knew I needed a bit more protein, so I fried up 2 eggs and man... That's the best breakfast I ever ate.
I never really thought about the class divide in attitudes toward meals until my grandparents came to visit some years ago. They lived most of their lives in the rural countryside of central China, and they had a saying: eat until full in the morning, eat well at noon, eat little at night (sounds a lot more poetic in Mandarin because of rhyming which is unfortunately pretty much always untranslatable). My parents, who have spent the better part of their lives as working-class Americans, shot them down; to them as it was to us kids, dinner was always the most important meal, probably because of the reasons you mentioned, that workers in industrial societies really only have time for some crappy pastry in the morning and a hurried boxed lunch in the company breakroom, and thus can only enjoy one proper meal with the whole family when they come home from work. I always thought that was interesting. My grandparents never really acquiesced to the big dinners, though.
23:45 - Well, that explains what happened to one of our cockatiels. She kept laying clutches of eggs, and eventually weakened. She only lived a couple of years. 😞 Our other female 'tiel lasted much longer, laying a couple of eggs once or twice/yr. We're unsure why Cinder was so fertile (and inevitably short-lived) and Sunny was not. Both of our male 'tiels lived much longer than either of our females. One of them is still alive at over 20 years old. Obviously they don't have the same concerns.
Adam, Adam, Adam... the absolute best part of eggs benedict is the fact that the sauce makes the English muffin soggy. It's basically like a yolky, crispy-AND-soggy-AND-chewy, slightly-under-cooked French toast. It's heaven BECAUSE of the redundancy. Yum.
Your aside about the difference between "supper" and "dinner" really resonated with me! My dad always called it "supper" and my mom called it "dinner." Dad was a blue collar worker; carpet layer, fiberglass repairman, etc. Mom was a chemist doing chemical safety for the likes of Texaco and other places. Interesting as always, Adam!
Adam, as a Brit I need to tell you. English muffins are just known as muffins over here. They are certainly not crumpets. Crumpets are a very different beast. They are pan cooked with crumpet rings. The only other comparable would be a pikelet. They have to have the holes in the top.
The mid-day meal at home was always "lunch" growing up, except for Sunday "dinner". The evening meal was always "supper". I'm from the American Midwest, and both sets of grandparents had roots on the farm. And when visiting said grandparents, I do remember lunch on the farm being referred to as dinner. Fresh baked bread, two kinds of meat, fresh veggies and pie for desert :) I'm 68 for reference. Cheers!
I am a couple decades less than you and I have the same recollection, dinner was lunch (and beautifully over done) and supper was dinner (and much lighter). Southern Illinois born for reference.
Sunday lunch was dinner in my family, and dinner was also the big meal on a holiday or other occasion, regardless of whether it was the noon or evening meal. My grandfather on one side generally called lunch dinner, while the grandparents on the other side called supper dinner.
As the evening meal was supper, what did you call the meal after that? When I was growing up, it was: Breakfast Morning tea Lunch Afternoon tea Dinner Supper
@@aussieintn8036 I think that if you call the main meal "supper", it's usually an evening thing (5-6 pm) and there's not really an actual meal after that. Maybe a late dessert or a light snack, but nothing a family would get together for, or that people would consider a regular part of their routine or schedule.
I did grow up on that midwestern family ranch, churning butter and collecting eggs and tomatoes with my grandmother for the next day's breakfast, which always included but was not limited to a box of bacon ends and pieces, which supplied the grease to fry a roll of hot breakfast sausage (sage, black pepper, and red pepper flakes), and a smaller skillet of salt pork. Then of course there were fried eggs, pans of fresh baked biscuits, homemade plum preserves, and lots of peppered white gravy. And sliced tomatoes, slices onions, and pickled cayenne vinegar. And coffee. Lots of coffee. The men of the family were going to be working cattle or hauling hay or plowing or such all day and needed nourishment. My grandmother usually fed leftover biscuits (soaked in blue john) to the yard dog (this was before commercial dog food) but my father would often sneak the biscuits to fill with leftover sausage and plum preserves, or salt pork, and take that, wrapped in wax paper, in a pocket for snacks. They rarely stopped for dinner. They drank gallons of tea through the day that my grandmother made fresh each morning while cooking breakfast. Nanny and I would take a salt shaker in our apron pockets and eat tomatoes and such while we hoed and weeded and watered the garden, which was bigger than my yard is now. That was fun except for digging potatoes, sweet potatoes, and beets. Suppers usually had fewer meats and many more vegetables, either from this year's garden or the canning pantry. And fresh cornbread, and then homemade desserts, mostly pies and cakes, but maybe pickled peaches or a blackberry cobbler (my favorites). Eggs were strictly breakfast food but as you said there were lots hidden in those cakes and pies and corn breads. My grandmother cooked for her husband and three grown sons, who all worked the ranch together, and for me when I was there (a lot), and for her aged too, whose dinner we walked a half mile up the road each day. She also managed that garden and the chickens, and kept me away from the hogs and the cattle and horses. We also collected wild spring greens and, later in the year, sand plums and blackberries. When I aged up to elementary school, one of my younger cousins took my place in the weekday garden, and another after her, and so on, until the adults aged out of the life.
I saved watching this for my drive to walk conservation easement properties in Eastern Ohio. Adam, your rambling expostulations are a favorite part of my week. Thanks, as always...
The southern breakfast is very real to me. When I was about 7yrs old my mother took my brother and me to visit her aunt and uncle in Kentucky. I vividly remember our huge farmer’s breakfasts there with eggs, bacon, sausage, pancakes, grits, fried chicken and biscuits with country gravy (by the way, they had a chicken coup). Incidentally, I remember my mother’s colorful “Uncle Ooch” telling my brother and I funny and ironic stories from his life, which I later discovered were retellings of O’Henry stories... fond memories.
Another aspect of the hunt breakfast is that it was self-service or buffet style. So it was also a hospitality flex to offer your guests a wide selection of meats. And not everyone ate every thing.
41:53 The dinner/supper distinction between the upper and middle/lower calls seems reversed in England (and with the addition of "tea" by working class, especially in the North, and if it's eaten before 6pm). I've only heard "supper" being used to mean the main evening meal by people I consider far wealthier or further up the class scale
@@appa609 It's really the opposite, you're far more likely to encounter rich people who've got the money and connections to travel adopting Americanisms. Also I want to note how extraordinarily fucking presumptuous is it to assume that a place that's been independently evolving the English language alongside its own unique social circumstances for centuries can only have changed because of America.
My country went from basic agricultural society to a modern European one in the span on my father's lifetime. When we have to do something away from home, he still eats the same way, he used to eat when he was a teenager and working in the fields with my grandma or when he was tending sheep. His breakfast consist of what was left of the previous night, during lunch he packs bread, feta cheese, on a good day pork salted fat, and may be boiled eggs. After the day is over, then he has his big meal
5:00 we call them breakfast muffins or even just English muffins in England Also did you know canadian bacon is also the standard in the UK. Occasionally called Danish bacon (but I think that's more because a decent amount of bacon is imported from Denmark especially the cheap stuff). Maybe this is how it became the standard in Canada. Certainly a lot of Britishisms which survive in Canada but not in the US. American style bacon is called streaky bacon here (for obvious reasons), but that is much less common than back bacon. Love the podcast by the way. One of the few podcasts I always listen to! My gf has just told me she's booked us a table at my city's best Brazilian steakhouse on my birthday since I was raving about how great it sounds after your recent episode about it! I'm also going to fast for 2 days in advance haha.
I think a lot of Americans assume "English muffin" must *not* be an authentic British food, because if it were it'd just be called a muffin, so we assume it's a corruption of some other similar looking food actually eaten in England that has some other name, and land on crumpets.
re: fasting for two days in advance If you want to eat a lot I'm unsure whether that's the best course of action. I read an article (albeit a long time ago) that says that that you should eat little bit to make sure your stomach doesn't contract from being too empty. Maybe look into that, but hey it's your life, happy birthday. 🤴
Canadian bacon is slightly different to UK- style bacon - 'Canadian bacon' is a US term that refers either to 'pure' back bacon with no fat at all (in Canada, this would be called 'back bacon,' or peameal bacon, if it's been rolled in cornmeal) unlike UK bacon which has some fat around the edge and a small fattier bit coming off the round of the loin. The most common kind of bacon here is actually just US style streaky bacon, also just called bacon
“hollandaise sauce is redundant on eggs Benedict” Reminds me of a friend from England telling me “you yanks putting meat on meat, chili dogs and chili and bacon on hamburgers.” The only downside to chili on those items is if the chili isn’t super thick. Then the bun just kinda absorbs it and becomes useless.
I have always wondered about the dinner/ supper naming convention. I am not convinced if I watch/listi to Adam long enough all my ponders will be answered. Thank you Adam for your time and energy.
I’m Irish and my parents would often make “dinner” in the middle of the day and “tea” at night, even though that’s less and less common these days. I had no idea about the origins of the full English/Irish/etc., very interesting! By the way, kudos not only for not lumping ireland in with the Uk, but also going as far as to refer to the islands of Ireland and Great Britain as the “Anglo-Celtic isles”, I’d never heard it before but it sounds more inclusive than just calling them the “British isles”. Great pod as always, Adam!
We have English Muffins in the UK too and they are a totally different thing to crumpets! The US influence does mean that generally we would also call them “English Muffins” and use just “Muffin” to refer to the individual portions cakes in cases (usually oil based and un-iced though to distinguish them from cupcakes where the icing is a big part).
American here, who used to make our own English muffins when I was baking bread - they are just a small ball of dough that is cooked on a griddle, which produces the flat shape, rather than baked in an oven, where they would become a round roll or bun. They should then be split with a fork, in order to get the nice nubbly texture that holds the butter or jam and allows it to soak in nicely. Apparently they were invented in the mid-19th C. by a British expat in the US who was feeling nostalgic. I've never made crumpets, but from what I know they are made with a softer dough, generally made with milk, raised with yeast and a little bicarbonate of soda to promote the production of holes. They need to be slowly griddle-cooked on one side, in circular molds to avoid turning into fat pancakes. And yes, a muffin is a whole different thing, cakey and baked in an oven. 👍
@@chezmoi42 Yes, I made homemade crumpets a long time ago. You are right about them being cooked on a flat hotplate in rings, but from what I remember you do flip them for the last 10% of cooking after the little holes have developed and it was more of a batter than a dough.
@@chezmoi42 No, English muffins were not invented in the USA in the mid 19th century. Recipes for them appear in English cookbooks dating back to 1747, first found in "The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy" by Hannah Glasse.
I don't think I heard muffins referred to as English Muffins anytime in the UK, pretty much everywhere else yes. Crumpets and by extension pikelets are made with batter rather than dough. Been making crumpets for ages now as I could not get them where I now live albeit I can now expensive imported ones at M&S. The main use of crumpets is to maximise butter input.
The local family Mexican restaurant has a dish called Enchiladas Sunrise. Yes, it's topped with fried eggs. But they're not open for breakfast and they serve it all day long. Lucky me!
Also Adam, I can confirm that when I was a kid (I am nearly 24), I too had those little boxes of cereal in hotels that you could convert into a bowl. I, too, thought it was very cool. So I can confirm at least some hotels had it circa 2007.
My wife's family does this with pasta. Whereas to me "speghetti" is a meal, with meat sauce and pasta all included under the blanket term "speghetti", my wife's psuedo italian family is ONLY talking about the pasta... And when it comes to packing up the leftover the sauce and pasta must be kept seperate because in the morning she wants to fry up some of those noodles and toss an over easy egg with salt and pepper on the semi-crispy noodles. "eggy-noodles" they call it (which IS contrarian to their insistence on calling pasta by it's right name) and it sounded crazy when she described it to me but it's actually pretty good 😂
In Canada we call it peameal bacon, despite that it is corn meal encrusted. Also dinner/supper is interchangeable, but I deliberately switched to supper to avoid confusion from my French Canadian in-laws and the word for lunch. Also, the egg lobby literally runs ads promoting eggs as more than just for breakfast, calling people weird for thinking it's weird.
I can't believe how long I avoided the podcast for. I just recently started to watch them, and they've quickly become my favorite form of content from Adam. I must binge them all now.
Hollandaise + egg yolk adds a layer of heterogeneity though. Sure, it's sauce + sauce, but the pure egg yolk is a wonderful richness that accents the relatively light (lol) hollandaise. I was gonna suggest the poached + slice of lemon to you, but you showed you don't need someone to suggest that. I, however, am excited to try it out now that it's entered my mind.
US Southern Breakfast, grits, eggs, biscuits, the real deal. Jimmy Dean sausage is the still the best-tasting, and one of the differences is that they actually skin the pigs, so their waste became a source for artificial "skin grafts" for burn patients after being planed into thin strips. Fun fact, my brother invented some machines to do this efficiently for the Burn Treatment Skin Bank in Arizona.
It's crazy that I was wondering the exact same thing yesterday. I watched a video where a youtuber "eats every breakfast item" and it seemed to me like this just meant "regular item + egg"
The idea of a breakfast pizza with an egg made me chuckle because I‘ve seen pizza topped with a runny egg multiple times when I traveled to southern France as a child. The French and Americans really seem to have a different view on eggs as a breakfast item 😁
I love eggs Benedict for exactly that reason, it's sopping with sauce. Granted I prefer eggs on toasted bread with a salsa or something (and always some hot sauce) but at most brunch places the wettest thing you can get is a Benedict
On the idea of midday dinner being a big meal and supper a small one, I found that was true with my German friend, when I stayed at her place in 2018. The big cooked meal was lunch, while dinner was a smaller fare of cold cuts, bread, salad vegetables and fruit.
Not long ago Mum proposed an idea that I put some Perino tomatoes (oval cherry tomatoes) in the oven and cook them. I sliced them in half, salt and pepper, a light spritz of olive oil spray. I did not taste the result, but Mum said they turned out really well. I believe she had them on toast. In other related tomato usage, canned tomatoes on toast, which is probably the modern industrial version of something Mum has said of her childhood - preserved tomatoes. As Mum has said, her family would go to the farms (they lived on the western side of the Blue Mountains in New South Wales (Australia)) and help harvest and buy a pile of fresh tomatoes, and Grandma would spend quite a bit of time preserving it. So outside the time they had fresh fruit, Mum would be eating preserved, jarred tomatoes, often on toast for breakfast. I presume that is how they became breakfast foods in the British culinary history. Mushrooms may have simply been a morning foraging session put into the pan. I occasionally watch Atomic Shrimp's cooking videos, and he has quite a few foraging vids, with things like wild greens, mushrooms, and fruit. (Atomic Shrimp is English, so his videos are a modern show of what an Englishman can find in his local area.) I could easily see Dad milking the cows, Mum foraging for greens and the right mushrooms, while the kids gather the eggs, and that all gets brought in and morning breakfast is eggs, yesterday's bread, fried tomatoes from the vegetable garden, mushrooms, fried greens, bacon from the larder, and fresh milk.
That sounds right. My grandma would cook a large hot meal for everyone at lunch for "mittagspause," my grandpa worked in the logging industry in Austria so having something hearty was necessary to get through the day. Evening is basically a build your own charcuteria board, which is how I explain it to folks here.
Egg binding is a really serious health concern for birds. It depletes their calcium levels and they can die within a few weeks if untreated. One thing to make clear, is that pet birds are never domesticated. They're still pretty wild. They're just smart enough to tolerate us and accept us as part of their pandemonium.
The term “supper” is also very common among older New Englanders, especially those who grew up in rural areas or suburbs and double-especially those who grew up very far north. Old French-Creole Mainers are very fond of the word as well.
I'll have you know, in my house, we sometimes have breakfast sausage for dinner (supper) with biscuits and gravy. I tend to put a light spread of the gravy on a split biscuit (almost like you would mayo on a sandwich for lunch) and the put the breakfast patty between the halves. People look at me weird for doing that, but it's really good that way.
The description of perforated cereal boxes brought me back to my childhood diner where I ordered Frosted Flakes in exactly that style box, because we never had sugared cereals at home.
My wife and I did a 1-month long road trip around France in 2017. It was amazing and I loved eating fresh bread, croissants and pastries for breakfast every day. However, i eventually realised that eggs are never served for breakfast (or at least not at the places we frequented around rural France). I missed it so much that I had to get my bacon and egg mcmuffin fix at a McDonald's at the end of our trip in Paris near the Bastille... I didn't know that I'd miss it until I did!!
12:00 Milk doesn't naturally have a lot of Vitamin D. Modern Milk producers fortify the Milk with Vitamin D. Its funny you bring that up though because Vitamin D is hard to find naturally in foods, but your main topic is a good source of vitamin D, EGGS! :D
dishes like carbonara pasta started like that. imagine a hot summer in italy, on the field. you take your lunch break at noon, you carry pancetta, eggs and cheese in your bag, you can make some fresh pasta easy peasy. have your supper, take a nap under a tree and go back to work around 2 or 3 pm, otherwise your brains become like scrumble eggs. mexican and spanish people know haha about "travel" animals. we often forget rabbits. along with pigs and chickens, rabbits were a staple in europe. there is a massive issue in australia regarding wild rabbits nowadays, that's because we used to eat and raise tons of them. my dad used to raise a small amount of meat rabbits too. my favourite recipe is onions, cauliflower, green olives, carrots, potatoes, wee bit of tomato paste, bay leaves, salt and pepper to taste. stew or pan (with a lid), as you like. just the best comfort food. adam a video or pod about rabbits? i know it seems like they are only pets now, for some reason, but historically and foodwise they make a great topic, i think.
Hi Adam. I think the chicken egg overdrive can be explained by bamboo seed cycle. I watched episode of Sam O'Nella Academy, and there he says, that chickens come from area abundant with bamboo. And bamboo usually produce seeds once every about 50 years. And they do it all at once. Because of that, for some time once every 50 years the bamboo forest are drowning in food. That sends hen's (and sadly rats'...) reproductive rate into the sky. During that time, they only focus on eating and reproducing. And because of that, mechanisms that would probably stop egg growing without mating are weaker than in other birds (although as far as I know at least one rooster is required to have good egg production) to make sure, that they have highest number of offspring during that time, no matter what.
Link to the episode, separately because I do not want to get my comment deleted automatically, just in case. th-cam.com/video/_NSekwyS4Ns/w-d-xo.htmlfeature=shared
tomatoes were not grown in England until 1590 - the Saxons were only 1000 years earlier - Think there is more than just heinz beans that were added later.
From the Midwest here: Often in my experience up here “supper” refers to a typical dinner at home, with your family. “Dinner” referred to a special meal either at home or out- birthdays, having friends over, or going out to eat, or making a more extravagant meal at home.
Yep, I was expecting a much shorter answer, but I still really enjoyed listening to the whole podcast and all your history. Sometimes I wonder who is better with the history, you, or the formally educated historians who have their own TH-cam shows.
I do wish he would just start the podcast by answering the question... i like the podcast, and im not impatient, but a little structure would be nice...
Thank you for for the Hungry Jacks shout out! As an Australian kid they had crowns they gave out and it never made sense until adult me learned about the burger king connection.
I like the hollandaise on the benedict. I don't think of it as redundant, I think of it as more. But still an interesting point of view from ragusea. Never thought of it that way.
@54:00 Australians are torn between American and British identities. We kind of resent both, but the times in which the country kind of came to be what it is happened to be times when both identities were competing for which ones we resented the least, while they held the lions share of the cultural space here, so it ended up being the two biggest identities to choose from.
We eat eggs in the morning because chickens often lay them in the morning. They're super fresh, a good source of protein and fat, not too heavy on calories, easy to prepare and incredibly versatile, and were used to supplement the previous day's leftovers for the morning's work ahead. We eat them so often for breakfast because there is almost nothing easier to eat and more available.
I guess I’m kind of weird as an American. Eggs are definitely associated with breakfast here, but I hardly ever have eggs for breakfast; I have them for lunch or dinner far more often. As someone who works a day/first shift job, I don’t have the time or energy to cook breakfast before work. I just have a banana or a breakfast bar on my way out the door, with a cup of coffee. Lunch is typically just dinner leftovers from a few nights ago. But for dinner I do very often cook with eggs. I love making frittatas. One of my favorites is made with sausage, butternut squash, and spinach. Perfect dinner meal. Three slices for dinner, and the other three for lunch the next day!
Two of the other things that can be found on an British breakfast table when really going for it are grilled (broiled) kidneys or smoked fish. The smoked fish either as fillets - kippers (butterflied herring) or arbroath smokies (haddock), or for the really upper class, kedgreree (which is smoked fish and eggs in a curried rice). And the class distinction over supper / dinner is inverted here - generally, only posh people call an evening meal supper. In fact it is commonly used as a marker of social origin which word one uses. The main exception I can think of is a Fish Supper - which is fish and chips as the early evening meal, and that's pretty universal if a little self-consciously old fashioned. As ever, regional differences apply, sometimes within just a handful of miles.
I worked Midnite for many years. I ate whatever the family had for dinner for my breakfast. Real breakfast foods was a treat. I am still that way I’ll eat the leftovers from the night before even though I’m retired. Spaghetti, chili, Caesar salad it’s food who cares what time you eat it.
Sitting here watching Adam, very excited that I get to chime in: I’ve had balut! Tastes like chicken broth with scrambled egg. Similar texture, too. Have it warm, sprinkle it with salt, and don’t look too closely.
"Or maybe you have both [genes] and your body just randomly shifts between phases of being able to digest lactose" So this pod is always fantastic, but this line made me stand up in my chair and shout "OH MY GOD!" to an empty room. I feel like I've just had my entire life explained
I have the same gene as you. My body shifts back and forth between lactose tolerance and intolerance. One day I can eat a whole piece of cheesecake with no problem, and the next day it gives me the horrible runs. What I’ve learned to do is just always keep a Lactaid pill in my pocket. If I drink milk or eat ice cream and start to feel a bit bloated, I take the pill, and within two minutes I feel normal again.
in my experience, it's worst if you haven't had dairy for a few weeks and suddenly drink milk. But if I keep eating dairy every few days, I stop farting after like 2 weeks
My way of eating tomato with breakfast is in a stack: toast, mayonnaise, over-easy or over-medium egg (yes, I do like egg sauce + egg yolk!), cheese, tomato slice.
37:35 - "demesne" is indeed pronounced "du-main". It's where we get the word "domain", as it means the land of one's estate, and indeed retains that meaning, more or less, today. (Obviously, specific definitions related to specialized fields, such as IT, derive another, related meaning.)
Some egg-eating snakes can only handle undeveloped eggs, because they just half-swallow it, crack it open in their throat and drink the liquid, then spit out the shell. I think they use smell to avoid eggs that are mostly developed. Those types can only eat bird eggs, not other snake eggs, because they can't crack a leathery shell. There are other snakes that eat eggs whole, and are less picky about what type, or how developed.
My Grate-Grandmother, who just passed away last week, called a the last meal of the day supper and the middle meal dinner. She lived on a farm most her life, and even after retiring, she lived out in rural development.
I wonder if this is an international thing, here in sweden we call dinner "middag" nowadays even though it literally means "mid-day", and "supper" translates to "kvällsmat" which literally means "evening food" which makes more sense yet is rarely used now.
My answer to excess egg yolk richness in eggs Benedict is to poach the left over whites from making the Hollandaise sauce. I put the egg white on the English muffin and cover with sauce. It’s perfect.
I never realized this until you pointed it out. Even in east Asia we also have eggs for breakfast. In china, you have egg drop, rice noodle soup with fried egg, congee with century egg and many more. In japan you got tamagoyaki, tamago kake gohan, in Korea you got fried egg with sesame oil and chili paste/powder. Very interesting
I've started using blended bananas instead of eggs in my sweet baked goods (especially blueberry muffins). The kids love it in the pancakes too. Just trying to do my part to keep the cost of eggs lower for everyone else's agrarian breakfasts :) Subbing banana for the egg in your cornbread recipe was a little weird though :p
0:43 "Obviously, Zac knows that the French also eat eggs for breakfast, it's not just us Americans." Maybe in brioche, but rarely as a savoury dish! I don't know many French people, especially those who haven't lived abroad, who fry up some eggs or make an omelet in the morning. French breakfast is mostly sweet: bread, butter and jam, or Nutella for instance.
The reason for the hollandaise on eggs benedict is for the acidity of the lemon. Sadly, most every restaurant version doesn't use enough lemon. Without the acidity, I agree, there is no point in hollandaise on eggs.
As you love Tomatoes! On the off chance you've never had this simple delight... Sausage and Tomato Hot Sandwich: - Peppery Sausage (Cumberland is peak) - Can of Plum Tomatoes (chopped would do) - Black Pepper - Sliced bread (whatever you love, soft white, brown, sourdough) Fry the sausages until you got some solid brown deliciousness going Whack your tomatoes in a pan and roughly crush them, then proceed to reduce by half, you want a thick af umami bomb. Add a pinch of sugar and salt to the tomatoes as well as a solid amount of black pepper. Slice the cooked sausage while still hot length ways and open onto bread, scoop a bunch of that delicious tomato goodness, complete the sarny with a top piece and eat it before the bread falls apart. That stuff is too dang satisfying! Screw it, one more! Cheese and Tomatoes on toast (Because in England, everything can be served on toast as an evening meal): - Sliced bread - Can of plum tomatoes - Mature Cheddar Do the same thing as above with your tomatoes minus the crushing, basically heat in a pan and reduce by at least a third, adding a pinch of sugar and salt and a solid amount of black pepper (close to a cajun cooking amount of black pepper). Lightly toast your bread, then add slices of cheese to the toast and continue toasting under a grill until melted. Put tomatoes on cheesey toast and enjoy more than you expected you would.
About stewing hens: In Finland one used to get them from the frozen section, but for some years now they've disapeared. Maybe people stopped buying them and the food infrastructure found other more profitable use for them. At the same time I've noticed that the amout and variety of ready made dinner packages has skyrocketed.
I'm at 40:30, so maybe you will say something similar soon. But it's funny how you mentioned their main meal "dinner" was eaten in the middle of the day. In swedish we call dinner "middag", which means mid day. Sounds pretty funny concidering it's in the evening. But I guess we, just as with "dinner", just took the name for the main meal and moved it around to whenever we wanted to eat it.
what i've heard is that the tomatoes in a full English are a flex, they were put there to show that the household was rich enough to maintain greenhouses to have hothouse grown tomatoes out of season any time they wanted them
that makes a lot of sense to me, especially as it would be adopted by more people to look wealthy when british colonies could grow tomatoes and ship them there for relatively cheap.
Makes sense
So much of culture comes from rich people trying to one up each other
@@KaitouKaijusince when is a full English the dish of choice of the fabulously wealthy? You can get it at an average English cafe.
@@mosquitocoast25 bro watch the fucking video
"I have no idea how Canadian bacon happened." Adam must be saving this digression for another episode
Long story short, a meat packer in Toronto, a city full of slaughter houses, wanted to send some pork to his family in England
*To be announced
As an Englishman, I'm baffled. Back bacon here (Canadian bacon) is just as cheap as streaky bacon (American bacon).
@@davespiller684 Back bacon and Canadian bacon aren't exactly the same thing. Back bacon is from the loins, and it has an eye of meat with a fatty strip, whereas Canadian is the tenderloin and there's just an eye with virtually no fat
@@brettjohnson536 Well thank you for enlightening me. How bizarre. So they actually use the tenderloin for that? I take it they have normal bacon from the loin and belly? What do they call that?
As an American who did archeological work last summer in the Balearic Islands in Spain, the siesta is absolutely necessary for manual labor. The Mediterranean sun in July is unbearable to work in, we woke up at 5:45 so that we would be done by noon because some poor person would pass out from heatstroke if we didn’t. Adam, I think you’d like Modern History TV, he’s a TH-cam channel devoted the the Middle Ages, a topic I’ve noticed you referencing more and more as of late. It’s awesome to see someone discussing my favorite historical period, it warms a history major’s heart
Modern History is a remarkable channel. I recommend it.
Absolutely necessary is obviously relative. I am extremely jealous of siesta culture and wish we had it here but it absolutely gets way hotter in the American south and Midwest and we don’t a mid day break so it’s not really necessary. I’d fight to have a break like that tho
@@MrJahka It's a different kind of heat, more similar to the Southwest (there's a reason California was colonized by the Spanish). I can say that it was necessary for excavation, maybe not for some other jobs, it depends obviously on your own constitution and what work you're doing. There was a record heat wave last year in Europe so that may have contributed to it
What time of day do roofers work in Phoenix in July?
@@nicholasricardo8443
I worked in a car wash in California. In all weather including the hottest days of the year. I then played basketball that same night.
I am NOT Spanish. Nor do I have Spanish ancestors. Its all Celtic and Germanic. The reason the Spanish colonized California is because they had already colonized Mexico and killed any other Europeans they caught sailing in what they claimed as their waters. If said Brit did not kill the Spanish first, see Sir Francis Drake.
You guys are just wimps that cannot stand the heat.
That "airfryers are just tabletop convection ovens" joke is funny until you fall for it and get a tabletop convection oven and learn it doesn't replace your airfryer in terms of crisping performance and speed.
I mean it literally is a table top convection oven it’s just hot air being moved across the food one just moves more air than the other. One has more optimized airflow but I’d venture to say there’s nothing really different about the principal mechanism behind them.
In England, "English Muffins" were simply called "muffins" until this was thrown into disarray when US-style muffins (aka cupcakes without icing) became popular here in the 90s.
A crumpet is a totally different style of bread. If you haven't tried one, you're missing out!
Fellow Brit detected
So do the people of England still call the 'English Muffins" just muffins or do they need to specify it at times with the rise of US style muffins? And yeah, I never thought about it but US style muffins are indeed cupcakes without icing.
In the US, saying muffins by itself with no other context means US style. All other types need to be specified such as "English Muffins".
>A crumpet is a totally different style of bread. If you haven't tried one, you're missing out!
We have them in the US. Not as popular as English Muffins though but you can find them in some stores. They are often confused with english muffins.
(real) crumpets are AMAZING
I could listen to you all day brother
Muffins are very much not cupcakes though? The recipes are not the same, they have entirely different textures, etc. etc.
I have a chicken farm down the street from my house that sells stewing hens. I should get one. It’s an amazing farm, I’ve never seen such spoiled chickens, totally worth it. You drive up and they’re all just chillin outside. I like how when they’re really relaxed they just flatten themselves on the ground like little pancakes.
as a free range chicken owner, the pancake thing is definitely funny but also causes mild panic attacks when they pancake a little too long in a weird position and you think they're dead until you walk up to them and they finally wake up 😭
As a former Midwesterner, I'd consider something like a fried egg sandwich a lunch item. Egg salad as well is more lunch/picnic than breakfast. Almost all other egg applications are breakfast though.
I'm a Nebraskan, we had chickens when I was a kid so we just plain ate lots of eggs.
I agree. Putting an egg on sandwich or burger is something that is for lunch not breakfast nor dinner. Sure, I'll eat it for dinner as well but it has more of a lunch / brunch vibe. But for the most part, adding eggs does make it more of a breakfast dish.
As a Torontonian I am well-versed in the history of Canadian Bacon! (AKA Peameal bacon as we call it). Toronto pork packer William Davies, who came to Canada from England in 1854, is credited with its development. The reason for wet-brining and curing the central loin cut of pork was because of the immense pork processing industry which took place in Toronto (This contributed to Toronto's longstanding nickname "Hogtown"). These centre-cut pork loins were very profitable traded goods and were sold en masse to larger cities like New York and Boston and across the ocean to the British Iles. And so to help preserve them for their long journey, they first were rolled with finely ground dried yellow peas (absorbing surface moisture) and then the more effective and palatable dried cornmeal, a process which still continues to this day. If you ever visit Toronto, Canada I highly recommend that you patronize the Carousel Bakery in the St. Lawrence Market, they are credited for serving up the the first and still the best Peameal Bacon Sandwiches!
Fun fact the 'stewing hen' in Chinese is 老母鸡 which literally translate to 'old female chicken' or 'senior hen'. It's also the ideal type chicken for stewing chicken soup in Chinese cooking.
That's "lǎo mǔ jī" for those of you who need the pinyin pronunciation 😊 If you speak Mandarin
The other day I had boxed Mac and cheese for dinner. I knew I needed a bit more protein, so I fried up 2 eggs and man... That's the best breakfast I ever ate.
Another fine hour of storytelling by Ragusea. Always appreciate the thorough research and dad humor.
I really enjoyed this format, especially the narratives around the evolution of the relationship between chickens and humans.
I never really thought about the class divide in attitudes toward meals until my grandparents came to visit some years ago. They lived most of their lives in the rural countryside of central China, and they had a saying: eat until full in the morning, eat well at noon, eat little at night (sounds a lot more poetic in Mandarin because of rhyming which is unfortunately pretty much always untranslatable). My parents, who have spent the better part of their lives as working-class Americans, shot them down; to them as it was to us kids, dinner was always the most important meal, probably because of the reasons you mentioned, that workers in industrial societies really only have time for some crappy pastry in the morning and a hurried boxed lunch in the company breakroom, and thus can only enjoy one proper meal with the whole family when they come home from work. I always thought that was interesting. My grandparents never really acquiesced to the big dinners, though.
23:45 - Well, that explains what happened to one of our cockatiels. She kept laying clutches of eggs, and eventually weakened. She only lived a couple of years. 😞 Our other female 'tiel lasted much longer, laying a couple of eggs once or twice/yr. We're unsure why Cinder was so fertile (and inevitably short-lived) and Sunny was not.
Both of our male 'tiels lived much longer than either of our females. One of them is still alive at over 20 years old. Obviously they don't have the same concerns.
Adam, Adam, Adam... the absolute best part of eggs benedict is the fact that the sauce makes the English muffin soggy. It's basically like a yolky, crispy-AND-soggy-AND-chewy, slightly-under-cooked French toast. It's heaven BECAUSE of the redundancy. Yum.
My god do I want eggs benedict now
Fr, he was spouting blasphemy
Your aside about the difference between "supper" and "dinner" really resonated with me! My dad always called it "supper" and my mom called it "dinner." Dad was a blue collar worker; carpet layer, fiberglass repairman, etc. Mom was a chemist doing chemical safety for the likes of Texaco and other places.
Interesting as always, Adam!
36:20
Adam, as a Brit I need to tell you. English muffins are just known as muffins over here. They are certainly not crumpets. Crumpets are a very different beast. They are pan cooked with crumpet rings. The only other comparable would be a pikelet. They have to have the holes in the top.
The mid-day meal at home was always "lunch" growing up, except for Sunday "dinner". The evening meal was always "supper". I'm from the American Midwest, and both sets of grandparents had roots on the farm. And when visiting said grandparents, I do remember lunch on the farm being referred to as dinner. Fresh baked bread, two kinds of meat, fresh veggies and pie for desert :) I'm 68 for reference. Cheers!
I am a couple decades less than you and I have the same recollection, dinner was lunch (and beautifully over done) and supper was dinner (and much lighter). Southern Illinois born for reference.
Sunday lunch was dinner in my family, and dinner was also the big meal on a holiday or other occasion, regardless of whether it was the noon or evening meal. My grandfather on one side generally called lunch dinner, while the grandparents on the other side called supper dinner.
My grandparents were dairy farmers and this is exactly how we ate when I visited them on the farm as a child in the 1980s
As the evening meal was supper, what did you call the meal after that?
When I was growing up, it was:
Breakfast
Morning tea
Lunch
Afternoon tea
Dinner
Supper
@@aussieintn8036 I think that if you call the main meal "supper", it's usually an evening thing (5-6 pm) and there's not really an actual meal after that. Maybe a late dessert or a light snack, but nothing a family would get together for, or that people would consider a regular part of their routine or schedule.
I did grow up on that midwestern family ranch, churning butter and collecting eggs and tomatoes with my grandmother for the next day's breakfast, which always included but was not limited to a box of bacon ends and pieces, which supplied the grease to fry a roll of hot breakfast sausage (sage, black pepper, and red pepper flakes), and a smaller skillet of salt pork. Then of course there were fried eggs, pans of fresh baked biscuits, homemade plum preserves, and lots of peppered white gravy. And sliced tomatoes, slices onions, and pickled cayenne vinegar. And coffee. Lots of coffee.
The men of the family were going to be working cattle or hauling hay or plowing or such all day and needed nourishment.
My grandmother usually fed leftover biscuits (soaked in blue john) to the yard dog (this was before commercial dog food) but my father would often sneak the biscuits to fill with leftover sausage and plum preserves, or salt pork, and take that, wrapped in wax paper, in a pocket for snacks.
They rarely stopped for dinner. They drank gallons of tea through the day that my grandmother made fresh each morning while cooking breakfast.
Nanny and I would take a salt shaker in our apron pockets and eat tomatoes and such while we hoed and weeded and watered the garden, which was bigger than my yard is now. That was fun except for digging potatoes, sweet potatoes, and beets.
Suppers usually had fewer meats and many more vegetables, either from this year's garden or the canning pantry. And fresh cornbread, and then homemade desserts, mostly pies and cakes, but maybe pickled peaches or a blackberry cobbler (my favorites).
Eggs were strictly breakfast food but as you said there were lots hidden in those cakes and pies and corn breads.
My grandmother cooked for her husband and three grown sons, who all worked the ranch together, and for me when I was there (a lot), and for her aged too, whose dinner we walked a half mile up the road each day. She also managed that garden and the chickens, and kept me away from the hogs and the cattle and horses. We also collected wild spring greens and, later in the year, sand plums and blackberries.
When I aged up to elementary school, one of my younger cousins took my place in the weekday garden, and another after her, and so on, until the adults aged out of the life.
I saved watching this for my drive to walk conservation easement properties in Eastern Ohio. Adam, your rambling expostulations are a favorite part of my week. Thanks, as always...
The southern breakfast is very real to me. When I was about 7yrs old my mother took my brother and me to visit her aunt and uncle in Kentucky.
I vividly remember our huge farmer’s breakfasts there with eggs, bacon, sausage, pancakes, grits, fried chicken and biscuits with country gravy (by the way, they had a chicken coup).
Incidentally, I remember my mother’s colorful “Uncle Ooch” telling my brother and I funny and ironic stories from his life, which I later discovered were retellings of O’Henry stories... fond memories.
Another aspect of the hunt breakfast is that it was self-service or buffet style. So it was also a hospitality flex to offer your guests a wide selection of meats. And not everyone ate every thing.
41:53 The dinner/supper distinction between the upper and middle/lower calls seems reversed in England (and with the addition of "tea" by working class, especially in the North, and if it's eaten before 6pm). I've only heard "supper" being used to mean the main evening meal by people I consider far wealthier or further up the class scale
probably because they're the old money English while the poors have been Americanized
@@appa609 It's really the opposite, you're far more likely to encounter rich people who've got the money and connections to travel adopting Americanisms.
Also I want to note how extraordinarily fucking presumptuous is it to assume that a place that's been independently evolving the English language alongside its own unique social circumstances for centuries can only have changed because of America.
Supper in the uk can mean a small meal before bed-
Breakfast, Dinner, Tea in Salford. Always having to clarify with people who use dinner to mean the evening meal
My country went from basic agricultural society to a modern European one in the span on my father's lifetime. When we have to do something away from home, he still eats the same way, he used to eat when he was a teenager and working in the fields with my grandma or when he was tending sheep. His breakfast consist of what was left of the previous night, during lunch he packs bread, feta cheese, on a good day pork salted fat, and may be boiled eggs. After the day is over, then he has his big meal
This is the way
@user-ic1jd7qs3p
> Feta
Сирене?
> pork salted fat
Сланина?
What is pork salted fat?
“eggs are expensive” is a mantra among my bird biologist friends. really cool stuff this episode!
16:16 -- Adam's evil grin as he reads about the wild fertilized egg was hilarious 😂
5:00
we call them breakfast muffins or even just English muffins in England
Also did you know canadian bacon is also the standard in the UK. Occasionally called Danish bacon (but I think that's more because a decent amount of bacon is imported from Denmark especially the cheap stuff). Maybe this is how it became the standard in Canada. Certainly a lot of Britishisms which survive in Canada but not in the US.
American style bacon is called streaky bacon here (for obvious reasons), but that is much less common than back bacon.
Love the podcast by the way. One of the few podcasts I always listen to! My gf has just told me she's booked us a table at my city's best Brazilian steakhouse on my birthday since I was raving about how great it sounds after your recent episode about it! I'm also going to fast for 2 days in advance haha.
I think a lot of Americans assume "English muffin" must *not* be an authentic British food, because if it were it'd just be called a muffin, so we assume it's a corruption of some other similar looking food actually eaten in England that has some other name, and land on crumpets.
re: fasting for two days in advance
If you want to eat a lot I'm unsure whether that's the best course of action. I read an article (albeit a long time ago) that says that that you should eat little bit to make sure your stomach doesn't contract from being too empty. Maybe look into that, but hey it's your life, happy birthday. 🤴
I've always wondered about the term _Canadian Bacon,_ like, _Wtf, Mate?,_ right?
@@neobridgey thanks for the tip!
Canadian bacon is slightly different to UK- style bacon - 'Canadian bacon' is a US term that refers either to 'pure' back bacon with no fat at all (in Canada, this would be called 'back bacon,' or peameal bacon, if it's been rolled in cornmeal) unlike UK bacon which has some fat around the edge and a small fattier bit coming off the round of the loin. The most common kind of bacon here is actually just US style streaky bacon, also just called bacon
“hollandaise sauce is redundant on eggs Benedict”
Reminds me of a friend from England telling me “you yanks putting meat on meat, chili dogs and chili and bacon on hamburgers.”
The only downside to chili on those items is if the chili isn’t super thick. Then the bun just kinda absorbs it and becomes useless.
The use is that it tastes good
I have always wondered about the dinner/ supper naming convention. I am not convinced if I watch/listi to Adam long enough all my ponders will be answered. Thank you Adam for your time and energy.
12:00 Vitamin D is not found naturally in milk, it's added.
I’m Irish and my parents would often make “dinner” in the middle of the day and “tea” at night, even though that’s less and less common these days. I had no idea about the origins of the full English/Irish/etc., very interesting!
By the way, kudos not only for not lumping ireland in with the Uk, but also going as far as to refer to the islands of Ireland and Great Britain as the “Anglo-Celtic isles”, I’d never heard it before but it sounds more inclusive than just calling them the “British isles”. Great pod as always, Adam!
We have English Muffins in the UK too and they are a totally different thing to crumpets! The US influence does mean that generally we would also call them “English Muffins” and use just “Muffin” to refer to the individual portions cakes in cases (usually oil based and un-iced though to distinguish them from cupcakes where the icing is a big part).
American here, who used to make our own English muffins when I was baking bread - they are just a small ball of dough that is cooked on a griddle, which produces the flat shape, rather than baked in an oven, where they would become a round roll or bun. They should then be split with a fork, in order to get the nice nubbly texture that holds the butter or jam and allows it to soak in nicely. Apparently they were invented in the mid-19th C. by a British expat in the US who was feeling nostalgic.
I've never made crumpets, but from what I know they are made with a softer dough, generally made with milk, raised with yeast and a little bicarbonate of soda to promote the production of holes. They need to be slowly griddle-cooked on one side, in circular molds to avoid turning into fat pancakes.
And yes, a muffin is a whole different thing, cakey and baked in an oven. 👍
@@chezmoi42 Yes, I made homemade crumpets a long time ago. You are right about them being cooked on a flat hotplate in rings, but from what I remember you do flip them for the last 10% of cooking after the little holes have developed and it was more of a batter than a dough.
@@chezmoi42 No, English muffins were not invented in the USA in the mid 19th century. Recipes for them appear in English cookbooks dating back to 1747, first found in "The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy" by Hannah Glasse.
@@joshuacole4066 Ah, well, pardon me, he simply popularized them there, then.
I don't think I heard muffins referred to as English Muffins anytime in the UK, pretty much everywhere else yes. Crumpets and by extension pikelets are made with batter rather than dough. Been making crumpets for ages now as I could not get them where I now live albeit I can now expensive imported ones at M&S. The main use of crumpets is to maximise butter input.
The local family Mexican restaurant has a dish called Enchiladas Sunrise. Yes, it's topped with fried eggs. But they're not open for breakfast and they serve it all day long. Lucky me!
We used supper and dinner interchangeably. The mid day meal was lunch. The first meal was breakfast.
Redundancy is fine, especially in Eggs Benedict; deliciously fine. Two is one and one is none.
Also Adam, I can confirm that when I was a kid (I am nearly 24), I too had those little boxes of cereal in hotels that you could convert into a bowl. I, too, thought it was very cool. So I can confirm at least some hotels had it circa 2007.
My motto: last night’s leftovers with an egg on it is today’s breakfast-at least on the weekends
My wife's family does this with pasta. Whereas to me "speghetti" is a meal, with meat sauce and pasta all included under the blanket term "speghetti", my wife's psuedo italian family is ONLY talking about the pasta... And when it comes to packing up the leftover the sauce and pasta must be kept seperate because in the morning she wants to fry up some of those noodles and toss an over easy egg with salt and pepper on the semi-crispy noodles. "eggy-noodles" they call it (which IS contrarian to their insistence on calling pasta by it's right name) and it sounded crazy when she described it to me but it's actually pretty good 😂
In Canada we call it peameal bacon, despite that it is corn meal encrusted. Also dinner/supper is interchangeable, but I deliberately switched to supper to avoid confusion from my French Canadian in-laws and the word for lunch. Also, the egg lobby literally runs ads promoting eggs as more than just for breakfast, calling people weird for thinking it's weird.
I can't believe how long I avoided the podcast for. I just recently started to watch them, and they've quickly become my favorite form of content from Adam. I must binge them all now.
Steak and eggs, the epitome of American breakfast.
No that would be sugar filled name brand cereal (human dog food)
This but unironically
That sounds like lunch to me, but I'm not American
Always thought bacon and eggs or steak or eggs needs carbs. Like hash browns
Family Guy was right!
Hollandaise + egg yolk adds a layer of heterogeneity though. Sure, it's sauce + sauce, but the pure egg yolk is a wonderful richness that accents the relatively light (lol) hollandaise. I was gonna suggest the poached + slice of lemon to you, but you showed you don't need someone to suggest that. I, however, am excited to try it out now that it's entered my mind.
US Southern Breakfast, grits, eggs, biscuits, the real deal. Jimmy Dean sausage is the still the best-tasting, and one of the differences is that they actually skin the pigs, so their waste became a source for artificial "skin grafts" for burn patients after being planed into thin strips. Fun fact, my brother invented some machines to do this efficiently for the Burn Treatment Skin Bank in Arizona.
It's crazy that I was wondering the exact same thing yesterday. I watched a video where a youtuber "eats every breakfast item" and it seemed to me like this just meant "regular item + egg"
Here I was looking for a reason to eat kebab for breakfast besides drinking the day before, just add egg.
The idea of a breakfast pizza with an egg made me chuckle because I‘ve seen pizza topped with a runny egg multiple times when I traveled to southern France as a child. The French and Americans really seem to have a different view on eggs as a breakfast item 😁
I love eggs Benedict for exactly that reason, it's sopping with sauce. Granted I prefer eggs on toasted bread with a salsa or something (and always some hot sauce) but at most brunch places the wettest thing you can get is a Benedict
On the idea of midday dinner being a big meal and supper a small one, I found that was true with my German friend, when I stayed at her place in 2018. The big cooked meal was lunch, while dinner was a smaller fare of cold cuts, bread, salad vegetables and fruit.
Not long ago Mum proposed an idea that I put some Perino tomatoes (oval cherry tomatoes) in the oven and cook them. I sliced them in half, salt and pepper, a light spritz of olive oil spray. I did not taste the result, but Mum said they turned out really well. I believe she had them on toast.
In other related tomato usage, canned tomatoes on toast, which is probably the modern industrial version of something Mum has said of her childhood - preserved tomatoes. As Mum has said, her family would go to the farms (they lived on the western side of the Blue Mountains in New South Wales (Australia)) and help harvest and buy a pile of fresh tomatoes, and Grandma would spend quite a bit of time preserving it. So outside the time they had fresh fruit, Mum would be eating preserved, jarred tomatoes, often on toast for breakfast.
I presume that is how they became breakfast foods in the British culinary history. Mushrooms may have simply been a morning foraging session put into the pan. I occasionally watch Atomic Shrimp's cooking videos, and he has quite a few foraging vids, with things like wild greens, mushrooms, and fruit. (Atomic Shrimp is English, so his videos are a modern show of what an Englishman can find in his local area.) I could easily see Dad milking the cows, Mum foraging for greens and the right mushrooms, while the kids gather the eggs, and that all gets brought in and morning breakfast is eggs, yesterday's bread, fried tomatoes from the vegetable garden, mushrooms, fried greens, bacon from the larder, and fresh milk.
That sounds right. My grandma would cook a large hot meal for everyone at lunch for "mittagspause," my grandpa worked in the logging industry in Austria so having something hearty was necessary to get through the day. Evening is basically a build your own charcuteria board, which is how I explain it to folks here.
Egg binding is a really serious health concern for birds. It depletes their calcium levels and they can die within a few weeks if untreated.
One thing to make clear, is that pet birds are never domesticated. They're still pretty wild. They're just smart enough to tolerate us and accept us as part of their pandemonium.
The term “supper” is also very common among older New Englanders, especially those who grew up in rural areas or suburbs and double-especially those who grew up very far north. Old French-Creole Mainers are very fond of the word as well.
In Québec, where those old French-Creole Mainers originate, we all say "souper", while the French from France say "dîner". Dîner is lunch for us.
My family from Northern NH and VT (Colebrook area) will still say "supper" and "dinner" was a huge meal you would eat late afternoon on a Sunday.
I'll have you know, in my house, we sometimes have breakfast sausage for dinner (supper) with biscuits and gravy. I tend to put a light spread of the gravy on a split biscuit (almost like you would mayo on a sandwich for lunch) and the put the breakfast patty between the halves. People look at me weird for doing that, but it's really good that way.
The description of perforated cereal boxes brought me back to my childhood diner where I ordered Frosted Flakes in exactly that style box, because we never had sugared cereals at home.
My wife and I did a 1-month long road trip around France in 2017. It was amazing and I loved eating fresh bread, croissants and pastries for breakfast every day. However, i eventually realised that eggs are never served for breakfast (or at least not at the places we frequented around rural France). I missed it so much that I had to get my bacon and egg mcmuffin fix at a McDonald's at the end of our trip in Paris near the Bastille... I didn't know that I'd miss it until I did!!
Really enjoyed this one, Adam. I got some many of life long "I wonder why...?" food questions answered in just this one video.
12:00 Milk doesn't naturally have a lot of Vitamin D. Modern Milk producers fortify the Milk with Vitamin D. Its funny you bring that up though because Vitamin D is hard to find naturally in foods, but your main topic is a good source of vitamin D, EGGS! :D
dishes like carbonara pasta started like that. imagine a hot summer in italy, on the field. you take your lunch break at noon, you carry pancetta, eggs and cheese in your bag, you can make some fresh pasta easy peasy. have your supper, take a nap under a tree and go back to work around 2 or 3 pm, otherwise your brains become like scrumble eggs. mexican and spanish people know haha
about "travel" animals. we often forget rabbits. along with pigs and chickens, rabbits were a staple in europe. there is a massive issue in australia regarding wild rabbits nowadays, that's because we used to eat and raise tons of them. my dad used to raise a small amount of meat rabbits too.
my favourite recipe is onions, cauliflower, green olives, carrots, potatoes, wee bit of tomato paste, bay leaves, salt and pepper to taste. stew or pan (with a lid), as you like. just the best comfort food.
adam a video or pod about rabbits? i know it seems like they are only pets now, for some reason, but historically and foodwise they make a great topic, i think.
Hi Adam. I think the chicken egg overdrive can be explained by bamboo seed cycle. I watched episode of Sam O'Nella Academy, and there he says, that chickens come from area abundant with bamboo. And bamboo usually produce seeds once every about 50 years. And they do it all at once. Because of that, for some time once every 50 years the bamboo forest are drowning in food. That sends hen's (and sadly rats'...) reproductive rate into the sky. During that time, they only focus on eating and reproducing. And because of that, mechanisms that would probably stop egg growing without mating are weaker than in other birds (although as far as I know at least one rooster is required to have good egg production) to make sure, that they have highest number of offspring during that time, no matter what.
Link to the episode, separately because I do not want to get my comment deleted automatically, just in case.
th-cam.com/video/_NSekwyS4Ns/w-d-xo.htmlfeature=shared
tomatoes were not grown in England until 1590 - the Saxons were only 1000 years earlier - Think there is more than just heinz beans that were added later.
impressed that you did the research into parrots/birds for this! ive inherited the privaldge of an over petted fmeal ringneck :D
There's a Burger King in Mattoon, IL that pre-dates the national chain. They "worked something out" after the national chain won a court case.
I did appreciate the 19 minute egg history tangent
From the Midwest here:
Often in my experience up here “supper” refers to a typical dinner at home, with your family.
“Dinner” referred to a special meal either at home or out- birthdays, having friends over, or going out to eat, or making a more extravagant meal at home.
Maybe it's an effect of changing tastes over time, but where I am (Western Canada), pork belly is typically 2-3x the price of pork loin
Right now I'm hiding from my chicken cause I ate all the chips and didn't keep anything for him and he heard the bag and is looking for me 😅😅
Yep, I was expecting a much shorter answer, but I still really enjoyed listening to the whole podcast and all your history. Sometimes I wonder who is better with the history, you, or the formally educated historians who have their own TH-cam shows.
I do wish he would just start the podcast by answering the question... i like the podcast, and im not impatient, but a little structure would be nice...
Legit Adam, I had an edible an hour and a half ago and you waltzed me so effortlessly into that ButcherBox ad I'm ordering based on respect.
Thank you for for the Hungry Jacks shout out! As an Australian kid they had crowns they gave out and it never made sense until adult me learned about the burger king connection.
I like the hollandaise on the benedict. I don't think of it as redundant, I think of it as more. But still an interesting point of view from ragusea. Never thought of it that way.
@54:00 Australians are torn between American and British identities. We kind of resent both, but the times in which the country kind of came to be what it is happened to be times when both identities were competing for which ones we resented the least, while they held the lions share of the cultural space here, so it ended up being the two biggest identities to choose from.
We eat eggs in the morning because chickens often lay them in the morning. They're super fresh, a good source of protein and fat, not too heavy on calories, easy to prepare and incredibly versatile, and were used to supplement the previous day's leftovers for the morning's work ahead. We eat them so often for breakfast because there is almost nothing easier to eat and more available.
adam said this. why did you post it?
I guess I’m kind of weird as an American. Eggs are definitely associated with breakfast here, but I hardly ever have eggs for breakfast; I have them for lunch or dinner far more often. As someone who works a day/first shift job, I don’t have the time or energy to cook breakfast before work. I just have a banana or a breakfast bar on my way out the door, with a cup of coffee. Lunch is typically just dinner leftovers from a few nights ago. But for dinner I do very often cook with eggs. I love making frittatas. One of my favorites is made with sausage, butternut squash, and spinach. Perfect dinner meal. Three slices for dinner, and the other three for lunch the next day!
thoroughly enjoyed this podcast, particularly the Thomas Becket moment haha
Two of the other things that can be found on an British breakfast table when really going for it are grilled (broiled) kidneys or smoked fish. The smoked fish either as fillets - kippers (butterflied herring) or arbroath smokies (haddock), or for the really upper class, kedgreree (which is smoked fish and eggs in a curried rice). And the class distinction over supper / dinner is inverted here - generally, only posh people call an evening meal supper. In fact it is commonly used as a marker of social origin which word one uses. The main exception I can think of is a Fish Supper - which is fish and chips as the early evening meal, and that's pretty universal if a little self-consciously old fashioned. As ever, regional differences apply, sometimes within just a handful of miles.
I worked Midnite for many years. I ate whatever the family had for dinner for my breakfast. Real breakfast foods was a treat. I am still that way I’ll eat the leftovers from the night before even though I’m retired. Spaghetti, chili, Caesar salad it’s food who cares what time you eat it.
Sitting here watching Adam, very excited that I get to chime in: I’ve had balut! Tastes like chicken broth with scrambled egg. Similar texture, too. Have it warm, sprinkle it with salt, and don’t look too closely.
I always thought what made it a breakfast pizza was the use of "breakfast sausage" as a topping.
"Or maybe you have both [genes] and your body just randomly shifts between phases of being able to digest lactose"
So this pod is always fantastic, but this line made me stand up in my chair and shout "OH MY GOD!" to an empty room. I feel like I've just had my entire life explained
You haven't.
@@Zach0451hes not being literal, smartass.
He's talked about this before, how his lactose intolerance goes in phases
I have the same gene as you. My body shifts back and forth between lactose tolerance and intolerance. One day I can eat a whole piece of cheesecake with no problem, and the next day it gives me the horrible runs. What I’ve learned to do is just always keep a Lactaid pill in my pocket. If I drink milk or eat ice cream and start to feel a bit bloated, I take the pill, and within two minutes I feel normal again.
in my experience, it's worst if you haven't had dairy for a few weeks and suddenly drink milk. But if I keep eating dairy every few days, I stop farting after like 2 weeks
56:20 Not sure if those puns were intended or not, but I love it :)
So technically speaking, we can agree that French Vanilla icecream is breakfast.
My way of eating tomato with breakfast is in a stack: toast, mayonnaise, over-easy or over-medium egg (yes, I do like egg sauce + egg yolk!), cheese, tomato slice.
I could listen to this guy talk about eggs an hour, literally
37:35 - "demesne" is indeed pronounced "du-main". It's where we get the word "domain", as it means the land of one's estate, and indeed retains that meaning, more or less, today. (Obviously, specific definitions related to specialized fields, such as IT, derive another, related meaning.)
Here in the further-east-than-Knoxville part of Tennessee calling it "dinner" instead of "lunch" is pretty common.
I would love a breakfast pizza video! My mom makes an amazing breakfast pizza, using croissants as crust!
That sounds great. Any online recipes for this ?
Some egg-eating snakes can only handle undeveloped eggs, because they just half-swallow it, crack it open in their throat and drink the liquid, then spit out the shell. I think they use smell to avoid eggs that are mostly developed. Those types can only eat bird eggs, not other snake eggs, because they can't crack a leathery shell. There are other snakes that eat eggs whole, and are less picky about what type, or how developed.
Here in Thailand, any meal, breakfast, lunch or dinner is completed' by slinging a crispy fried egg on top. I fully endorse this.
My Grate-Grandmother, who just passed away last week, called a the last meal of the day supper and the middle meal dinner. She lived on a farm most her life, and even after retiring, she lived out in rural development.
I wonder if this is an international thing, here in sweden we call dinner "middag" nowadays even though it literally means "mid-day", and "supper" translates to "kvällsmat" which literally means "evening food" which makes more sense yet is rarely used now.
@@swedneck Germanic cultures have a long history of being plain spoken.
Adam... It's a ratio thing. Imagine a breakfast sandwich with 2-3x the running yolk... and half the bread.
It's a beautiful thing.
Shakshuka is amazing. That or microwaved "Indian" takeaway with a fried egg on top 😃
My answer to excess egg yolk richness in eggs Benedict is to poach the left over whites from making the Hollandaise sauce. I put the egg white on the English muffin and cover with sauce. It’s perfect.
I never realized this until you pointed it out. Even in east Asia we also have eggs for breakfast. In china, you have egg drop, rice noodle soup with fried egg, congee with century egg and many more. In japan you got tamagoyaki, tamago kake gohan, in Korea you got fried egg with sesame oil and chili paste/powder. Very interesting
I've started using blended bananas instead of eggs in my sweet baked goods (especially blueberry muffins). The kids love it in the pancakes too. Just trying to do my part to keep the cost of eggs lower for everyone else's agrarian breakfasts :)
Subbing banana for the egg in your cornbread recipe was a little weird though :p
0:43 "Obviously, Zac knows that the French also eat eggs for breakfast, it's not just us Americans." Maybe in brioche, but rarely as a savoury dish! I don't know many French people, especially those who haven't lived abroad, who fry up some eggs or make an omelet in the morning. French breakfast is mostly sweet: bread, butter and jam, or Nutella for instance.
The reason for the hollandaise on eggs benedict is for the acidity of the lemon. Sadly, most every restaurant version doesn't use enough lemon. Without the acidity, I agree, there is no point in hollandaise on eggs.
As you love Tomatoes!
On the off chance you've never had this simple delight...
Sausage and Tomato Hot Sandwich:
- Peppery Sausage (Cumberland is peak)
- Can of Plum Tomatoes (chopped would do)
- Black Pepper
- Sliced bread (whatever you love, soft white, brown, sourdough)
Fry the sausages until you got some solid brown deliciousness going
Whack your tomatoes in a pan and roughly crush them, then proceed to reduce by half, you want a thick af umami bomb.
Add a pinch of sugar and salt to the tomatoes as well as a solid amount of black pepper.
Slice the cooked sausage while still hot length ways and open onto bread, scoop a bunch of that delicious tomato goodness, complete the sarny with a top piece and eat it before the bread falls apart.
That stuff is too dang satisfying!
Screw it, one more!
Cheese and Tomatoes on toast (Because in England, everything can be served on toast as an evening meal):
- Sliced bread
- Can of plum tomatoes
- Mature Cheddar
Do the same thing as above with your tomatoes minus the crushing, basically heat in a pan and reduce by at least a third, adding a pinch of sugar and salt and a solid amount of black pepper (close to a cajun cooking amount of black pepper).
Lightly toast your bread, then add slices of cheese to the toast and continue toasting under a grill until melted.
Put tomatoes on cheesey toast and enjoy more than you expected you would.
About stewing hens: In Finland one used to get them from the frozen section, but for some years now they've disapeared. Maybe people stopped buying them and the food infrastructure found other more profitable use for them. At the same time I've noticed that the amout and variety of ready made dinner packages has skyrocketed.
This channel just keeps getting better
I'm at 40:30, so maybe you will say something similar soon. But it's funny how you mentioned their main meal "dinner" was eaten in the middle of the day. In swedish we call dinner "middag", which means mid day. Sounds pretty funny concidering it's in the evening. But I guess we, just as with "dinner", just took the name for the main meal and moved it around to whenever we wanted to eat it.
Always a quality podcast. Thanks Adam.
26:40
i played bass for Chicken Eating Hairless Monkeys
38:18 one caveat is a bare egg without mud or anything to slow the heat will likely build too much pressure and explode