GOOD MORNING AMERICA

From eggs Sardou to shrimp and grits to paleo bowls, ALEXANDRA CARLTON crossed four US states to find the ultimate breakfast of champions.

- ALEXANDRA CARLTON

It’s 9am on a Tuesday morning in the coastal Southern town of Biloxi, Mississippi, and I’m sitting in a red vinyl booth in a down-home diner called Fill-up with Billups, scanning a menu that looks like it’s doing its best to shorten my life expectancy by several years. Every entry reads like it’s competing with every other to pile up more elements than the one before. One example: “Tender smoked brisket sandwiched between a double order of crispy hash, topped with cheddar-fried jalapeño rings, pico, sour cream, two eggs your way, finished with house BBQ sauce and green onion.” I could add sides if I chose: smoked bacon, grits, breakfast sausage, American cheese. I’d come across a lot of exuberant menus in my quest to eat the ultimate American breakfast over this 12-day trip across Los Angeles, New Orleans and coastal Mississippi and Alabama. This one takes, if you will, the (pan)cake.

In the end I select a – relatively – understated order of chicken and waffles, as the waitress refills my coffee and calls me “Sugar”. It’s a challenging dish to someone whose palate isn’t accustomed to eating a savoury main and a dessert on the same plate – I keep trying to redirect the syrup from oozing onto the chicken with my knife – but by this point in my breakfast odyssey I’m a pro at ploughing my way through all sorts of eye-watering American foods.

America’s breakfast dishes are fascinating, representing nearly every part of that country’s psyche and story: inventiveness, immigration, slavery, puritanism and, of course, rampant capitalism and spin.