English muffin

Lore & Background

The word 'muffin' is thought to come from the Low German 'muffen', meaning 'little cakes', with a possible link to Old French 'moflet'. The first recorded use of the word was in 1703, and recipes appear in British cookery books as early as 1747 in Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery, though the product is undoubtedly older. Glasse described the muffins as being 'like a Honey-comb' inside. The Oxford Companion to Food notes confusion between muffins, crumpets, and pikelets; the English muffin has been described as a variant of a crumpet, with the difference being that in a crumpet the holes go all the way to the top, whereas in an English muffin the holes are inside.

By the mid-18th century, muffin men—hawkers who traveled door to door selling English muffins—became common, as most homes lacked their own ovens. Their bell-ringing became so widespread that in 1839 the British Parliament passed a bill to prohibit it, but sellers did not adhere. In 1861, 'good-sized' muffins from street-sellers sold for a halfpenny each. The tradition of the muffin man continued until the Second World War. The nursery rhyme 'The Muffin Man', dating from at least 1820, traces to this custom.

In the United States, references to English muffins appear in newspapers from 1859, with detailed descriptions and recipes by 1870. A popular brand, Thomas', was founded in Manhattan in 1880 by English immigrant Samuel Bath Thomas, who called the product 'toaster crumpets' and intended them as a more elegant alternative to toast for fine hotels. In 1910, Fred Wolferman of Kansas City began making denser English muffins using empty tin cans as molds. Foster's sourdough English muffins were a signature menu item at Foster's restaurants from the 1940s to the 1970s and continued as a packaged brand until 2008.

Reader's Guide

English muffins are significant as a traditional British bread that evolved from earlier flatbreads and became a staple of breakfast and tea culture. Their preparation—cooked on a griddle and flipped, rather than entirely oven-baked—gives them a flattened shape and a distinctive interior crumb with holes, setting them apart from both crumpets and American-style quickbread muffins. The muffin men of the 18th and 19th centuries, who sold them door-to-door with handbells, became a cultural touchstone, memorialized in the nursery rhyme 'The Muffin Man' and referenced in Oscar Wilde's 1895 play The Importance of Being Earnest. In the United States, English muffins were reintroduced by Samuel Bath Thomas in 1880 and later became essential to eggs Benedict and the McMuffin, cementing their role in modern breakfast sandwiches. The product's legacy includes a range of varieties—whole wheat, multigrain, cinnamon raisin, cranberry, and apple cinnamon—and its continued presence in both the UK and US markets, where it remains distinct from the sweeter American muffin.

Did You Know?

• English muffins are cooked on a griddle and flipped, not entirely oven-baked, giving them a flattened shape.
• The first recorded use of the word 'muffin' was in 1703, and a recipe appears in Hannah Glasse's 1747 cookbook.
• Muffin men sold English muffins door-to-door until the Second World War, and their bell-ringing was prohibited by Parliament in 1839.
• Samuel Bath Thomas, an English immigrant, founded Thomas' English muffins in Manhattan in 1880, originally calling them 'toaster crumpets'.