American Versus British English: What Are Biscuits, Muffins, and Pudding?

Lauren Vogelbaum (0:01)

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Hey BrainStuff, Lauren Vogelbaum here.

English is a wonderfully surprising language, full of inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies that confound even its native speakers, partially because of the ways it's changed as it's moved around the world. Take food terminology, for example, and specifically baking terminology. And, yes, I am thinking about this because of the television show The Great British Bake Off. Itself renamed The Great British Baking Show here in the US and Canada because the term Bake Off was already trademarked by the Pillsbury Company. And trademarks are the most easily explicable part of all of this. For example, if a speaker of American English followed a British English biscuit recipe, expecting something buttery and flaky for a egg and bacon sandwich, they'd be in for a disappointing breakfast. That's because a British biscuit is an American cookie, sort of. Americans will label a range of baked goods cookies, including big moist, chewy treats studded with chocolate chips or chopped nuts, or flat cake-like confections smeared with frosting, or crisper, crunchier concepts, like an Oreo.

The British biscuit leans more towards the latter. They tend to be plainer, thinner, and drier. Some are sandwiched around a layer of jam or cream, like an Oreo, and others are jazzed up with a coating of chocolate, or flavored with ginger or cocoa, or studded with small bits of dried fruit or nuts. But none are anything close to moist and chewy, because they're meant to hold up to being dipped in tea or coffee. Think of a Biscoff cookie, or something more like biscotti.

American English picked up the word cookie through a Dutch term for little cakes, which may partially explain our breadth of cookie understanding.

A further article this episode is based on, House of Works spoke with Tim Brown, senior instructor of the College of Food Innovation and Technology at Johnson and Wales University. Born and raised in South Africa, Brown worked as a pastry chef in the UK before moving to the States. He said, I don't think Americans can get their heads around how dry and brittle a biscuit is.

Then there are digestives, a subset of British biscuit that's traditionally round, hard, and plain-ish, and made with coarse ground whole wheat flour, or sometimes a wheat and oat mix, to give it a bit of texture. Today, these can also be flavored, or chocolate covered, like other biscuits. American grocers do sometimes import them, but there's no close American equivalent, other than maybe animal crackers or graham crackers. You can see our episode from 2021 for more on graham crackers, but very basically, they were originally made with coarse ground whole wheat flour and no flavorings. And their creator was a health hound who would be rolling in his grave if he knew that we make them with cinnamon sugar now.

Anyway, all of these crunchy creations are closer to what the word biscuit originally meant. The word comes to us from the old French for twice cooked, and would have referred to flat breads that had been baked twice to dry them out, perhaps for storage or travel. The American concept of a biscuit is not that. It's a light and fluffy square or round of bread, usually a type of quick bread, meaning one that's been raised with chemical leaveners as opposed to raised with yeast. An American biscuit is usually a little salty, savory, and can be either very buttery and flaky or slightly drier and breadier in texture. These biscuits are served as the bread for breakfast sandwiches or as a starchy side with any meal, like a bread roll. They are sometimes incorporated into a main dish, like chicken and biscuits, which is a sort of casserole with biscuits baked into the top.

The closest thing to an American biscuit in the UK is called a scone. It's also typically a round of quick bread and will be on the breadier end of the texture spectrum with less butter in the dough, at least partially because you're expected to spread it with butter or clotted cream or jam when you eat it. They're still light and fluffy though. These scones are served at tea time and are usually just slightly sweet.

This is yet again in opposition to American scones, which are eaten as snacks alongside coffee or tea, but are often triangular in shape, denser and crumblier in texture, and very sweet with cookie-like flavorings and mix-ins in the dough, such as chocolate chips, fresher dried fruit, or chopped nuts. A note here that you can make scones fresh to be more like the UK version, and you can put savory ingredients like herbs and grated cheese in them, and that's delightful. But the confusion doesn't stop there. We need to talk about muffins. In American English, a muffin is basically an unfrosted cupcake that you're allowed to eat for breakfast. They're another type of quick bread, more like a banana bread than a dinner roll. Very moist and cakey in texture, and heavily sweetened, usually with some of those cookie or scone style ingredients mixed in. This type of baked good can sometimes be found in the UK under the name American muffin. Because, okay, to imagine what the food muffin is in British English, forget the breakfast cupcake and picture instead what an American would call an English muffin. This is a baked good that's a circle of yeast risen bread, flat-ish but still fluffy and a little chewy. It's griddled on the outside and has little air pockets on the inside, you know, nooks and crannies. It's usually on the slightly savory end, sometimes with a sourdough tang. In the 1800s, baker and entrepreneur Samuel Bath Thomas popularized his English muffins in the US, but he didn't invent them. Over in the UK, these English muffins are just called muffins and have been around for centuries. They are, in fact, the type of muffin referred to in the nursery rhyme, Do You Know the Muffin Man?