Breakfast Sandwich

The breakfast sandwich is the American morning handheld: a fried or folded egg, a slice of melting cheese and a cooked meat, usually bacon, sausage or ham, pressed into a roll, bagel, English muffin or biscuit and eaten on the way to work. Its reference form is the New York deli bacon-egg-and-cheese on a kaiser roll, ordered with "salt, pepper, ketchup" and wrapped in foil, and its mass-market form is the Egg McMuffin that McDonald's introduced in 1972, a round egg cooked in a ring on a toasted English muffin with Canadian bacon and American cheese. The sausage-egg-and-cheese biscuit of the American South is a third branch, built on a tall buttermilk biscuit instead of bread. Since the 2010s a bakery and café version has grown up around it, with brioche buns, thick-cut bacon, aged cheddar and hot sauce, and the price has grown with it.