Biscuits and gravy is a popular breakfast

Breakfast

Breakfast is the first meal taken after rising from a night's sleep, most often eaten in the early morning before undertaking the day's work...

 dish in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, especially in the South

Southern United States

The Southern United States—commonly referred to as the American South, Dixie, or simply the South—constitutes a large distinctive area in the southeastern and south-central United States...

.

It consists of soft dough biscuits

Biscuit (bread)

A biscuit in the United States, and widely used in popular American English, is a small bread made with baking powder or baking soda as a chemical leavening agent rather than yeast....

 covered in thick "country" or "white" gravy, made from the drippings of cooked pork sausage

Sausage

A sausage is a food usually made from ground meat , mixed with salt, herbs, and other spices, although vegetarian sausages are available. The word sausage is derived from Old French saussiche, from the Latin word salsus, meaning salted.Typically, a sausage is formed in a casing traditionally made...

, white flour

Flour

Flour is a powder which is made by grinding cereal grains, other seeds or roots . It is the main ingredient of bread, which is a staple food for many cultures, making the availability of adequate supplies of flour a major economic and political issue at various times throughout history...

, milk, and often (but not always) bits of sausage, bacon, ground beef, or other meat. The gravy is often flavored with black pepper

Black pepper

Black pepper is a flowering vine in the family Piperaceae, cultivated for its fruit, which is usually dried and used as a spice and seasoning. The fruit, known as a peppercorn when dried, is approximately in diameter, dark red when fully mature, and, like all drupes, contains a single seed...

. In some parts of the southern United States this is also called sawmill

Sawmill

A sawmill is a facility where logs are cut into boards.-Sawmill process:A sawmill's basic operation is much like those of hundreds of years ago; a log enters on one end and dimensional lumber exits on the other end....

 gravy.

History

Although the American English and British English use the same word for biscuit to refer to two distinctly different modern edible foods, early hard biscuits (North American: cookies), were derived from a twice-baked bread, whereas the North American biscuit is similar to a savoury European scone

Scone

-Food:* Scone , a type of quick-bread, typically eaten with jam and cream.* Drop-scone, British word for a small pancake-People:*Barbara Young, Baroness Young of Old Scone , Labour member of the House of Lords...

.

Early Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

an settlers in the United States brought with them a simpler and easy style of cooking, most often based on meat, ground wheat and warmed with gravy. After the first pigs

PIGS

PIGS is a four letter acronym that can stand for:* PIGS , Phosphatidylinositol glycan anchor biosynthesis, class S, a human gene* PIGS , the economies of Portugal, Italy , Greece and Spain...

 were carried from England to Jamestown, Virginia

Jamestown, Virginia

Jamestown was a settlement in the Colony of Virginia. Established by the Virginia Company of London as "James Fort" on May 14, 1607 , it was the first permanent English settlement in what is now the United States, following several earlier failed attempts, including the Lost Colony of Roanoke...

 in 1608, they became popular as a home-grown edible animal.

The meal emerged as a distinct regional dish after the American War of Independence, when stocks of food stuffs were in short supply. Breakfast was necessarily the most substantial meal of the day in the South, for a person facing a day of work on the plantations. While everyone wanted something different and distinct from the British, the lack of supplies and money meant it also had to be cheap.

Variations

While biscuits and gravy generally refers to sausage gravy, it can also refer to egg gravy, made in one of two ways:

• by scrambling eggs
  Scrambled eggs
  Scrambled eggs is a dish made from beaten whites and yolks of eggs . Beaten eggs are put into a hot pot or pan and stirred frequently, forming curds as they coagulate.-Sample preparation:...
  
   in bacon grease, then adding flour and milk to make gravy, and adding crumbled bacon back to the mixture
• by making a basic roux
  Roux
  Roux is a cooked mixture of wheat flour and fat, traditionally butter. It is the thickening agent of three of the mother sauces of classical French cooking: sauce béchamel, sauce velouté and sauce espagnole. Clarified butter, vegetable oils, or lard are commonly used fats. It is used as a...
  
  , creating a brown gravy base, then whisking beaten eggs into the boiling gravy

Tomato gravy is white gravy mixed with crushed or diced tomatoes.