Breads

Here is an easy, quick recipe for basic American breakfast biscuits. Spread with jam or serve topped with a generous portion of sausage gravy. Baking powder biscuits make a great addition to any Sunday morning breakfast.

Bammie, or bammy, is a cassava bread descended from the simple flatbread eaten by the Arawaks, Jamaica's original inhabitants. In Jamaica, bammie is usually bought from a local vendor and served for breakfast or as a side dish with fish.

Bao, also known as baozi, are pillowy, soft buns that are either steamed or baked. They come with a variety of fillings and are a common item in dim sum shops. Bao are a favorite breakfast or mid-morning snack.

Barmbrack is a tea bread popular in Ireland, especially around Halloween. It is best served toasted with a smear of butter and a cup of Irish tea.

Boxty comes from the northern regions of Ireland and goes well with a breakfast of sausages, bacon and eggs or as a side dish to Irish stew.

These small cheese fritters are an excellent and easy side dish for a Puerto Rican meal.

Chapati, or chapatti, is a popular bread accompaniment to a northern Indian meal. It is a simple wheat flatbread typically baked on a hot griddle, or tava. Pieces are broken off and wrapped around food before it is popped in the mouth.

This recipe is for Southern cornbread, a drier, crunchier cornbread than its more cake-like Northern counterpart. It is best eaten same day it is baked. Stale leftovers can be used to make cornbread dressing. See the variations to make the Northern version.

Cornbread dressing is the only dressing there is for many Southerners. It's a favorite for Thanksgiving. The recipe below is a basic foundation for many variations. Each cook has his or her favorite version.

This is the traditional recipe for Irish soda bread, containing only flour, baking soda, salt and buttermilk. Soda bread became a popular hearth bread in Ireland in the mid-19th century when baking soda became available as a leavener. A baked loaf of bread is called "cake," while flattened wedges baked on the stovetop are called "farl." Soda bread is best eaten warm from the oven. It stays fresh for only a day or two, tightly wrapped. Leftovers are good for toast.

Lefse is a flatbread from Norway — similar to a flour tortilla or chapati — that is generally made with a potato-based dough and grilled on a flat griddle. Traditionally lefse is rolled out with a grooved rolling pin that prevents air pockets and is turned with a special wooden paddle. Lefse is not as common in Norway as it once was, but it has retained its popularity among Norwegian Americans, who often serve it around the holidays. Variations include hardangerlefse, or krotekaker, made with wholewheat flour and dried for long storage.

Naan is the famous bread from northern India that is baked in a distinctive tandoor oven. Variations of naan are found throughout Central Asia and Iran and into the Middle East. The intense heat of a tandoor is most closely replicated in the modern home by a very hot oven.

Nacatamales, are popular steamed corncakes from Nicaragua and Honduras. They are similar to Mexican tamales but are larger, filled with meat and vegetables and steamed in banana leaves. Nacatamales are special occasion food and are most often served as a Sunday morning meal or at Christmas, weddings and other large celebrations.

Pan de muerto, or "bread of the dead," is a sweet anise-scented bread served during Mexico's Días de los Muertos celebrations. The bread is offered up at temporary altars to relatives and friends who have passed away. Loaves are typically round and decorated with a knob of dough on top, representing a skull, and with bone-shaped pieces of dough around its perimeter. Pan de muerto is often sprinkled with colored sugar or glazed with orange juice.

Also known as flapjacks, hotcakes or griddlecakes, pancakes are a traditional breakfast food in the United States. Variations of the pancake, sweet and savory, are found around the world, from the French crèpe to Indian dosas. In England, Canada, Ireland and Australia, pancakes are traditionally eaten on Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras)--a day sometimes known as Pancake Day--as a way to use up rich foods like butter, milk and eggs before the fasting of Lent.

Pães de queijo are tasty little cheese buns popular in Brazil. They are made with yuca (cassava) flour, which gives them an interesting taste and texture and makes them a gluten-free treat. Modern Brazilians can purchase packaged mixes or buy pães de queijo from street vendors, but homemade is best. Serve pão de queijo with coffee for breakfast.

This is your basic dough for any Neapolitan-style pizza. Use all-purpose flour for a more authentic, cracker-like crust for your pizza. Bread flour gives the dough more of a chew and makes it more -- well -- bread-like. As with any yeast bread recipe, the exact amounts of flour, water and rising time are dependent on the day's weather. Follow your intuition.

Pita bread is common throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Versions of this simple round loaf are found from Northern Africa to as far east as India. The popularity of pita, also known as khoubz araby, is said to have been spread eastward and westward by the conquering armies of Alexander the Great.

This recipe approximates the true injera, which is made from a fermented sourdough batter. Most recipes don't call for the lemon juice, but I find it necessary to supply the essential sour flavor that real injera adds to a meal.

Tamales de elote are a favorite breakfast food in Mexico and throughout Central America. In El Salvador and Guatemala they are often served as the starchy portion of a meal. The fresh elote, or corn, used in Central America has a higher starch content than that in the United States, but the addition of masa harina in this recipe produces a very good approximation of the original.

Tamales are a staple of Central American cuisine. At their simplest, they are masa corn dough wrapped in corn husks or banana leaves and steamed in a large pot — the tamalera. Most tamales have some sort of stuffing. There are thousands of varieties of tamales, and each region has its own specialty. This simple recipe makes tamales stuffed with chicken in tomatillo sauce. Feel free to experiment with your own stuffings.

This tender, lightly sweet loaf makes good use of Ethiopia's abundant honey.

Yorkshire pudding is the traditional accompaniment to a roast prime rib dinner. Popular not just in Yorkshire but throughout England, Yorkshire pudding was traditionally made by pouring the batter into a roasting pan and cooking it along with the meat. Baking it in the same pan after the roast has been removed captures all of the flavor, but lets you cut out a lot of the fat. Yorkshire pudding is often topped with a gravy or pan jus.