I will accept no more whining from the brits on this issue

Is it "pudding" in the American sense or the British?

Brits who complain about (American) biscuits and gravy have clearly never had (American) biscuits and gravy
- Usually, you'll find they'll start making fun of you before you can even explain what it is
  
  I love watching videos online of Brits trying food from the southern US because they always recoil at the sight of it before saying it's one of the best things they've ever tasted.
  "It looks like a chopped up ferret."
- We made some for the first time about a month ago and it was pretty good. I have some ideas for improving next time, but it was good enough to be worth making again.
  I did feel very silly calling it biscuits and gravy though. The "biscuits" are more like dumplings or something, made from crumbly dough, not actually biscuits (aka cookies or crackers for Americans, I think). The "gravy" is also not gravy, it's a thick sauce with vegetable lumps in. Ours was mostly tasteless but flavoured with thyme for a nice almost aftertaste. I was worried when I was cooking the sauce, but with a whole dinners-worth it was a really nice, subtle flavour. It lets the herbs and vegetables shine through.
  I was looking up a recipe to jog my memory for the sauce, and apparently this is a breakfast food? Wtf is wrong with you, all of America? This was like a nice hearty dinner lol. What a bizarre way to start your day. Anyway, thanks for reading my review of biscuits and gravy that I don't remember why I wrote any more 😂
  
  Dafuq gravy did you have with vegetables? It's a heavily peppered bechamel, starting from a sausage fat roux.... and to spite the French a bit more we use black pepper.
  
  Okay… so… dear god please try again? lol.
  If you want American biscuits for biscuits and gravy they should be fluffy and almost crumbly. You can just get the non-flaky stuff from pillsberry (theirs are vegan as a plus) in the states.
  The gravy needs to have a “sausage” base, if you’re going vegetarian I suggest getting either impossible sausage (the tube not the patties) or field roasts Apple maple sausages (but then you gotta use a fuckload more pepper and more oil). Cool the sausage first, break it up, use its fat (usually also pour in some more oil if you don’t cook with a lot) make a roux (by adding flour to the fat. You can leave the sausage bits in, break up the links/patties if you didn’t use the tube stuff) add more pepper than you think should exist in food, then some oat milk. Let it cook until it re thickens enough to coat a spoon. Salt to taste. Serve on broken up biscuits.
  If it’s bland, you need more pepper, or better “sausage” or more of it. If the carb in carb sauce does not leave you in a food coma it was also probably not right.
  
  There are no vegetables in biscuits and gravy.
  
  Vegetable lumps?
  Not sure what y'all were having, but it weren't gravy.
  
  It is a little heavy for breakfast for my tastes, yes. But it was originally used by people doing hard farm labor during the day who needed the calories and I do not at all fit that description so I respect the tradition even if I don't follow it.
  Vegetable chunks in the gravy seems a little unusual but I totally see it fitting the dish if you don't want to make a separate vegetable side. But here's my little recipe, passed down my family for god knows how long. They didn't give me much, but they gave me this:
  Take breakfast sausage in ground form. If you only have links and you want to replicate the original tradition, you can remove the casing to get at the sausage inside. Or just cut up the links if you don't want to waste the casing. If you don't have access to breakfast sausage or it's too expensive, this is the approximate spice mix to use in conjunction with ground pork: sage, thyme, rosemary, black pepper, nutmeg, allspice, ginger, red pepper flakes, coriander, garlic powder.
  Cook breakfast sausage until you have toasty bits on the outside. Coat the sausage with flour, then cook for as long as you can without the flour burning. Then add milk, cook and stir until flour is incorporated with the milk into a sauce. Ratios are very forgiving, traditionally you'd use more milk and flour to get more mileage out of expensive meat.
  Biscuits are also hella easy. Break cold butter (or whatever fat source you can afford, but not liquid oils) into chunks, mix into flour. Add buttermilk and baking soda, or milk and baking powder, then bake at 170 C until golden brown. Ratios are very forgiving as well.
  
  You're incorrect; this is how we use the word "biscuit".
  Edit: I fucked up; please see below.
  
  In addition to the previous gravy comments, namely that you absolutely must use some crumbly sausage textured protein and the associated fat, I’ve got something else to mention.
  Perfect crumbly biscuits are so good and also so tricky to make, that I feel like there’s a slim chance you nailed it the first time, so keep trying.
  I struggle to nail it and I’ve been attempting on and off for decades. What makes it difficult is:
  if you over-work them (stirring more than ~12 times) and the ingredients become homogenous, the texture is ruined.
  They’re still edible but nothing like the real deal.
  If the ingredients get warm then the butter will melt and once again ruin the texture.
  If you cut the biscuits wrong (e.g. twisting) the sides will “smear” together and they won’t rise right, ruining the texture again.
  A perfect (buttermilk/crumbly) biscuit should be fluffy, crumbly, golden brown on the outside, white on the inside and have 10-20 little yellow butter “pearls” dispersed throughout it, something like tiny blueberries in a blueberry muffin.
  Even knowing all that, I still find myself failing often and chasing that 5-10% of times when they came out perfect. That said, I’m shit at baking bread for some reason, just cursed it seems. Other people (grandmas notably) can just fucking nail it every time.
  The gravy should be pretty easy: start with a generous amount of fat, lightly brown a little flour to make a slurry, add milk little by little until it’s thick like a chowder, add black pepper and “sausage” crumbles. You can always add more milk, NEVER ADD MORE FAT
  
  Break up a breakfast sausage in the white sauce along with plenty of pepper. That will liven up it's taste. White sauce on its own is literally just a flour, butter, and milk, reduction. So yeah it's pretty bland on it's own. Some people also use Cayenne Pepper and/or cook bacon in the pan first to incorporate the grease into the sauce.
  And yeah this food was meant to be eaten early by workers and get them to lunch. Especially explorers, sailors, and soldiers. People who burn a lot of calories.
  
  FYI biscuits back in the 1700s were something between the US and UK biscuit in terms of size and softness. UK went thin, hard, and sweet as time passed. US went big, soft, and savory.
  Biscuits and gravy are a classic breakfast food but only when you want a hardy breakfast. It's closer to a full English breakfast as to when you would eat it.
- it's pretty good if you can get over the fact it's not biscuits or gravy.
  They ain't putting brown sauce on shortbread. more like white sauce on savoury scones.
  
  I don't get the petulant attitude about basic word differences. Different food and linguistic traditions exist in different places. Absolutely bonkers, right?
  Early British settlers in the United States brought with them a simple, easy style of cooking, most often based on ground wheat and warmed with gravy. Most were not wealthy men and women, and so it was a source of cheap nutrition.
  A very similar practice was also popular once with the Royal Navy as hard, flour-based biscuits would keep for long journeys at sea but would also become so difficult to chew that they had to be softened up. These were first introduced in 1588 to the rations of ships and found their way into the New World by the 1700s at the latest.
  The biscuit emerged as a distinct food type in the early 19th century, before the American Civil War. Cooks created a cheaply produced addition for their meals that required no yeast, which was expensive and difficult to store. With no leavening agents except the bitter-tasting pearlash available, beaten biscuits were laboriously beaten and folded to incorporate air into the dough which expanded when heated in the oven causing the biscuit to rise. In eating, the advantage of the biscuit over a slice of bread was that it was harder, and hence kept its shape when wiping up gravy in the popular combination biscuits and gravy.
  American biscuits and gravy are direct descendants of British biscuits and gravy. And American biscuits are not scones
  
  Sir please don’t ever bring your hate speech to Atlanta if you value your safety
  
  Or it is biscuits and gravy, and the people who think that phrase means brown sauce on cookies are wrong.
  
  Are you even allowed to type ain't? Won't they come take your internet license?
- It's scones covered in a white sauce built on sausage meat roux. Nothing wrong with it, but not much right with it either, it's just calories.
  
  Not scones, American biscuits. They're different. Flaky, buttery, not sweet. And if there's "not much right with it" then you had a crappy gravy without enough grease and pepper.
- I have had them at a pretty famous bbq place in Texas, they are tasteless and dry and the gravy is a sin that even the most watery Bisto outclassed spectacularly.

This should be a 3-way with Canadians putting gravy on fries.
Haven't tried gravy on pudding but I'm sure it's as great as the other two.
- This should be a 3-way with Canadians
  I strongly agree
- Tell me you’re a poutine virgin w/o saying it…
  
  I wasn't being sarcastic. I like both poutine and biscuits and gravy, and I'm pretty sure gravy on pudding is good too. They all sound off-putting if you don't know what they are, though.
- You know the Brits do that too.
  And if you fancy a moment of horror,look up what a Wigan Kebab is.
- It doesn't work with the joke though: Americans use the word "pudding" to refer to something sweet while Brits use the word "biscuit" to refer to something sweet. Fries aren't sweet in either of the two opposing dialects. So both should be able to see the appeal
  
  While most of our biscuits are sweet nowadays, they’re not exclusively so and plenty of savoury examples exist.
  The word came from the old French “bescuit” which was about the process of drying things out so they would keep longer, like on ships for example.
- Chips and gravy is amazing. So are chips and curry sauce.

Yorkshire pudding is not pudding, it’s crockery.

It’s hard to go wrong with gravy. But I’m Canadian, we don’t use whatever you guys call biscuits. We use French fries and cheese.
- Cheese curds make my teeth feel funny. But in a good way.
- Yes and we Canadians like browned gravy from roasts. White sausage gravy isn’t really a thing here.
  
  I cannot believe there is such a thing as white gravy. It sounds like it looks like jizz.
- I got hooked on poutine after my first visit to Canada, made my own for weeks afterwards. 10/10 no notes
- Add some Mexican pork sausage to that poutine and I'm in.
  
  Bro you can add whatever you want to poutine and it will be good. It’s damn near impossible to ruin that dish.
  
  I think I've seen chorizo poutine as an option the one time I visited Canada, in Niagara falls I believe it was. But I only had time to try the classic, and also I can't remember if it was Mexican style chorizo or Spanish style chorizo or something else
- I'm not a fan of the white gravy that goes over biscuits, but I'm on totally board with the gravy that goes with your fries. I will admit to some initial skepticism.
  
  Wait… wtf is white gravy?

What could possibly be offensive about putting gravy on a fairly dry bread product? Wtf?

Now make one with Canadians putting gravy on fries and Danes putting gravy on burgers.
- Hawaiian also put gravy on burgers over rice and it's a treasure
  
  What does it look like?
  
  Is there a bun on that? If not it's just a Salisbury steak which I assume is the Japanese influence creeping in. Never quite understood why they like hamburger steak so much. I always associate it with frozen dinners.
- I absolutely will not tolerate gravy fry hate and I'm not even Canadian.
- Ketchup is just tomato gravy anyway. A sauce made by thickening a reduction of something high in glutamate with cornstarch. It's more of a gravy than chip beef gravy, which is a more basic roux. Only difference is fat content, but that's why it's paired with mayo.
  
  Personally I think of ketchup more like a puréed tomato chutney or relish, it's the style I'd do if I made my own.

The only Brits that would whine about that are softy southerners.
Come up North if you like your gravy. Up here it's strong and thick enough that the spoon stands straight up!
- Mmm, that's how I make my sausage gravy. Got made fun of by an Appalachian guy for it being like concrete but hey, why not if you've got the meat, right?
  
  Oh lad, if you like your meats and gravy, you should come to the UK and visit Manchester, Liverpool, or York.
  Also everyone in the UK over hypes Greggs just because it's such a national institution now but never mention the more tasty Pieminister because it's not as widespread.
  Let me know if you're ever around the Peak District and you're more than welcome to join our family for a proper Sunday Roast Dinner with THICC gravy.

So when you say "pudding", you mean white pudding or black pudding?
- The core joke here is that Yorkshire pudding is unsweetened, just as American biscuits are unsweetened
- Tapioca pudding.
- Yorkshire

Italian Americans putting gravy on pasta: 👉🕷️

You don’t have biscuits or gravy though.
- I agree, they don't have biscuits they have cookies.
- The English word "Sherbert" and the bangla word "Sharbat" derive from a common linguistic ancestor from before the indo-european split. One word refers to flavored ice, and another refers to a cold, sweet drink.
  Odds are, neither one is the same as the original proto-indo-european refreshment that they derived from. When a people goes to a new place, they take their tastes with them and apply them to what's available to them there.
  Words, too, change meaning over time. It's just the way things go. Nothing stays the same. Cultures drift, and people evolve.
  What I call a biscuit may be closer to what you call a scone, and white gravy may be an abomination to your eyes, but it is just as cherished to me as Yorkshire pudding and brown gravy likely is to you.
  And hell, y'all's empire fell to pieces long ago. The time is coming where y'all're gonna have to start engaging with cultures other than y'all's own as equals instead of with that insufferable smug sense of superiority for once. Best start practicing now
  
  I’m having a laugh mate. Why do so many of you take so much so seriously?
  
  And hell, y’all’s empire fell to pieces long ago. The time is coming where y’all’re gonna have to start engaging with cultures other than y’all’s own as equals instead of with that insufferable smug sense of superiority for once. Best start practicing now
  I wouldn't say America's 'empire' has fallen to pieces just yet but the rest of your comment is good advice for Americans.
  
  Once again absolutely nothing intelligent was uttered by a person who says "y'all"
  
  One word refers to flavored ice, and another refers to a cold, sweet drink.
  Neither of those are Sherbert
  
  They love engaging with the French and copying their food and language to seem sophisticated.

Americans putting it all in jello.
- Yeah if you had a time machine to the 70s maybe.

Isn't gravy that thick brown sauce you eat with turkey? If that's the case both belong in a mental institution.
- That's one kind. The kind Americans put on biscuits is white and very thick. It is a mixture of sausage grease, flour, milk, and shitloads of black pepper.
  Texturally, they're a nightmare but the flavor is excellent.
  
  very thick If you can afford it. In the old days lean years meant thin gravy
  Texturally, they're a nightmare
  I'll forgive you just this once. It may take some getting used to but it has no equal