A muffin in England is an unsweetened cake, thick but flat, eaten toasted for tea; unhappily the American nomenclature English-muffin is taking over here, as Americans imagine that what are properly called sweet buns (a sort of cupcake, but not iced) should be called muffins. Muffins here [real ones] are a fine old tradition ~~ in Dickens' Oliver Twist, Mr Grimwig visits Mr Brownlow for tea on days when he expects him to be eating muffins. And these are the sort of muffins that "The muffin man who lives in Drury Lane" in the nursery=rhyme would have been selling; along with another sort of unsweetened English teatime flat toasted cake, the crumpet, which is cellular baked and so absorbs the butter when hot, and has a particularly delicious flavour which folklore ascribes to a recipe traditionally kept secret by bakers. {"Crumpet", in English slang, is a word synonymous also with "totty", denoting the female regarded as sexual object; tho what the connection [apart from delicious desirability] to teatime treats I have never quite understood.

~Michael~