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One day last week John Bailey (The Old Grey Poet) alluded to a traditional English breakfast -- even included a photograph of such, complete with eggs (omelet), hash browns, English bacon, sausage, baked beans, and tomato.
Gillian bakes a lot. The other day she baked a large batch of blueberry muffins, taking half away with her to feed her friends as they gathered around an autumn evening bonfire and leaving the rest to feed us. (Thank you, Jill) Well, combine a platter covered with blueberry muffins (in two different sizes because she was using two different sized muffin pans) with that recent thought about muffins and English muffins, and I could see a journal entry forming...
And then one of the supermarkets in town had a sale on Thomas' English Muffins this week -- two packages for the price of one.
The closest thing to an "English muffin" in England (until the product was brought across the Atlantic) is the crumpet. A bit of Internet research indicates that Samuel Bath Thomas migrated from England to the U.S.and by 1880 had his own bakery in New York City. In attempting to replicate his mother's recipe for crumpets (perhaps not remembered quite accurately) he ended up with what he marketed as an "English muffin." The other kind of muffin -- like Jill's blueberry muffins -- came about in the 19th century with the invention of baking powder. Because they usually have some kind of fruit or nut mixed in with them, people think of them as being healthy. Now that they have found a new home in coffee shops... which tend to serve huge muffins with two or three (or more) items (like cranberry raisin chocolate almond) they can pack considerable caloric impact. Hey, did you ever wonder what they call French toast in France? Say, I'm getting hungry... [They call it pain perdu -- "lost bread"]
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