And from Deena in Bitches, a different kind of porn:
White sauce is lovingly prepared and delicate. White gravy, also called sausage gravy, is home-style, thrown-together-in-the pan: milk, stirred up with flour and drippings like a lady mixing in with slatternly company.
It's very good, and I miss it. Served over biscuits, fluffy, buttermilk, layered, biscuits (mine if I want to work too hard), or my grandmother's drop biscuits (not quite as good, but made with love), covered in white gravy with bits of sausage, served with sliced tomato on the side. Mmmmm.
Visit to my gran-gran (my mother's mom), breakfast always included biscuits and gravy, scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, ham slices if she had them, tomatoes slices, sometimes cucumber in a dill dressing, jalepeno jelly, some other fruit jelly or jam, always home-made, hashbrowned potatoes... and then anything else she found that she thought someone might like. When my youngest brother was there, it included pickled eggs. Ick.
Visits to my grandma (dad's mom), breakfast wasn't usually so big it wouldn't all fit on the table, but for lunch, there was always a pot of beans with a hamhock in it on the back of the stove, fried taters (in this case no po-included) with onion, bologna, white bread, butter (I don't get it either), a dozen assorted pickled things, fresh sliced tomatoes and cucumbers my grandpa had grown, some form of squash fried up, also with onions, and then anything else she thought someone might like.
Their tables almost always looked, for sheer foodage, like a holiday.