Tag Archives: muffin

54 Posts 53 Days

Coffee and blueberry muffin in the garden

I suppose the title gives it away, but if my counting is correct, I have published 53 posts in the 53 days of this year. This one is the 54th and puts me one ahead of the count.

I’ve done a bit, but should have done more. It’s a familiar feeling. That’s why I’ve just been looking at my emails and am now baclk blogging six hours early.

TESCO has everything for me apart from buttermilk, so they are sending ordinary milk. It’s not really an acceptable substitution and as I have plenty of milk, I don’t need more. They obviously don’t realise that buttermilk nd milk don’t do the same thing, just as they tried to substitute oven bottom muffins with English muffins once – again, two different types of bread. Yes, Americans, bread. What you call a muffin is just a big iced bun or a fairy cake. I can understand why many of our linguistic differences occur but I’ve never understood this one.

So I looked it up.

It seems, according to the hugely reliable and incomparably knowledgeable internet that the “English” Muffin, like so many things, is an American invention. It was invented in the mid=19th Century by a man called Samuel Bath Thomas. He was a baker who wanted a flagship product and decided to call this product the “English” muffin.

Flatbreads ready to go

Where did he get that idea? I hear you ask. Well, it seems he got the idea from a recipe his mother had always used for muffins. She was from England, and by coincidence, so was he. So all he did was move to America and start making muffins. That’s not quite the same as inventing them.

In England the muffin can trace its history back to the tenth century. Other bread products, of course, can be traced back even further. Tenth century? That’s about the same time that the Vikings arrived, having hopped over via Greenland. That, I think, was the last time anyone actually invaded America via Greenland, despite recent fears over security. Or, if you are more comfortable with dating by Disney, it was about 500 years before Pocahontas.

At that time, although there was no wheat flour available in the Americas there were other grains (maize, amaranth and quinoa) and a variety of other products which could all be made into bread-like products.

So, to summarise. English muffins were invented somewhere and were widely known in England, where they were known simply as “muffins” for centuries. The recipe was taken to the USA, the name was changed and nobody seems to be able to say why a muffin changed from a small bread product to became a cake covered in calories.

They exist today in bakeries, but mainly in McDonalds at breakfast time. Sweet muffins have, meanwhile, invaded the nation and are available everywhere.

Anybody in the USA or Canada know? Or anywhere else in the world.

That will do for now. I’ve wasted enough time and need to get back to going through my list of jobs.

Remember to look at the first blog post of the day, and check to see if there is a third.

McDonald’s Breakfast

A Limerick (2)

22 Replies

It has just been brought to my attention in the previous post, by John, of John’s Postcards that a large number of people mispronounce the word scone. It’s not their fault. They have clearly been badly counselled at some time in the past and have failed to correct the error. It doesn’t make them bad people, just misguided, and I decided to write a limerick for them too.

A Mainer, who is quite well known,

noted winter had been knocked from its throne.

She’d grown tired of muffins

and decided that nothing

could compare to a Great British scone.

It’s wrong, and I probably shouldn’t encourage them in their heresy, but in the end I like scones for the way they taste, not how they sound.

A Limerick

18 Replies

It grew from a comment Laurie made on my post about scones/muffins. I woke up just after six this morning and wrote a couple of drafts then finished it this evening. It’s not perfect but it will do to spread a little light cheeriness and fill my need for a post a day.

A Mainer, who was seldom wrong,

noted winter was nearly all gone.

She’d grown tired of muffins

and decided that nothing

could compare to a Great British scone.

Not Quite Scones – but I’m calling it Number 8 in the series

35 Replies

We had coffee with blueberry muffins in the Mencap garden this morning as part of my programme of guerrilla snacking. This came as a surprise, as until I needed a word to describe my random intake of sugary calories I didn’t know I had a programme of guerrilla snacking. The coffee came out of a flask and the muffins came from McDonalds. Consequently, I have to admit that quality wasn’t necessarily the keynote of the morning. However, real life can’t be all cappuccino and croissants. Or scones.

I’m calling it Number 8 in the series, just to add some light and shade to the Scone Chronicles. Location was good, company was excellent but muffins just aren’t scones.

Coffee and muffins in the garden

The flowers are doing well, though they could do with more of them. Unfortunately money is so tight that there isn’t any for fripperies like flowers. They are saving for a new cover on the second polytunnel. I’ve just ordered 100 snowdrops. I’m going to plant some at home and give Julia the rest. She’s a lucky woman – blueberry muffins and snowdrops all in one day.