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Speaker 1: Welcome to BrainStuff, a production of iHeartRadio. 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 U.S. 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. For the article this episode is based on, HowStuffWorks spoke with Tim Brown, senior instructor of the College of Food Innovation and Technology at Johnson & 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 flatbreads 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. a 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 U.S., but he didn't invent them. Over in the U.K., 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? Related to this type of muffin is the U.K. 's crumpet. Crumpets are also yeast-risen circular goodies, but the dough is usually a bit thinner and usually lightly sweetened, something between an English muffin and a pancake. They're made thin enough that you only have to griddle them on one side, and the air bubbles, or nooks and crannies, rise to the surface. You wind up with a spongy sort of bread that can be toasted and spread with butter and your other toppings of choice, and eaten for breakfast or a snack. Both English muffins and crumpets are traditionally cooked on a griddle, using circular forms or tins that are open on both ends. They would have originally been made of metal, but these days might be something non-stick like silicone. British English does tend to refer to all baking pans as baking tins, no matter whether they're made of metal, glass, or otherwise. Side note, while a muffin tin or cake tin is pretty self-explanatory— sandwich tins refer to the pans used to make layer cakes. Which brings us to the question of pudding. In American English, a pudding is a type of stovetop custard, these days often made from a small box of mix from a brand like Jell-O or purchased pre-made and enjoyed as a dessert or snack. Pudding in British English can refer to a number of things. British pudding includes an array of dishes, both sweet and savory, that are traditionally boiled or steamed. This includes types of sausage, like white pudding, a nice chunky sausage made with oats or barley, black pudding, which is white pudding made dark with the addition of blood, and haggis. Yorkshire pudding, on the other hand, is like an eggy popover. But on the sweet side, the word pudding is commonly used as shorthand for dessert in general, as in, what would you like for pudding? even if the dessert in question isn't a pudding at all. And if you're having what an American would consider pudding for pudding, it wouldn't traditionally be eaten by itself. UK custards are usually layered with some stewed fruit like rhubarb or into fancier dishes like trifle. By the way, if you're not from the UK and have no idea what on earth treacle could be, treacle refers to refined sugar-based syrups. Very basically, If a recipe were to call for dark treacle, you could sub in molasses. And for light treacle, also called golden syrup, you could make your own sugar syrup with a little bit of acid in it. But that's going to have to be a whole other episode. Sugar is another topic that is, shall we say, excitingly complex. Today's episode is based on the article, Great British Baking Terms, Know Your Scones From Your Biscuits, on HowStuffWorks.com, written by Dave Ruse. BrainStuff is a production of iHeart Podcasts in partnership with HowStuffWorks.com and is produced by Tyler Klang. For more shows from iHeart Podcasts, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1: Welcome to BrainStuff, a production of iHeartRadio. 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 U.S. 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. For the article this episode is based on, HowStuffWorks spoke with Tim Brown, senior instructor of the College of Food Innovation and Technology at Johnson & 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 flatbreads 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. a 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 U.S., but he didn't invent them. Over in the U.K., 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? Related to this type of muffin is the U.K. 's crumpet. Crumpets are also yeast-risen circular goodies, but the dough is usually a bit thinner and usually lightly sweetened, something between an English muffin and a pancake. They're made thin enough that you only have to griddle them on one side, and the air bubbles, or nooks and crannies, rise to the surface. You wind up with a spongy sort of bread that can be toasted and spread with butter and your other toppings of choice, and eaten for breakfast or a snack. Both English muffins and crumpets are traditionally cooked on a griddle, using circular forms or tins that are open on both ends. They would have originally been made of metal, but these days might be something non-stick like silicone. British English does tend to refer to all baking pans as baking tins, no matter whether they're made of metal, glass, or otherwise. Side note, while a muffin tin or cake tin is pretty self-explanatory— sandwich tins refer to the pans used to make layer cakes. Which brings us to the question of pudding. In American English, a pudding is a type of stovetop custard, these days often made from a small box of mix from a brand like Jell-O or purchased pre-made and enjoyed as a dessert or snack. Pudding in British English can refer to a number of things. British pudding includes an array of dishes, both sweet and savory, that are traditionally boiled or steamed. This includes types of sausage, like white pudding, a nice chunky sausage made with oats or barley, black pudding, which is white pudding made dark with the addition of blood, and haggis. Yorkshire pudding, on the other hand, is like an eggy popover. But on the sweet side, the word pudding is commonly used as shorthand for dessert in general, as in, what would you like for pudding? even if the dessert in question isn't a pudding at all. And if you're having what an American would consider pudding for pudding, it wouldn't traditionally be eaten by itself. UK custards are usually layered with some stewed fruit like rhubarb or into fancier dishes like trifle. By the way, if you're not from the UK and have no idea what on earth treacle could be, treacle refers to refined sugar-based syrups. Very basically, If a recipe were to call for dark treacle, you could sub in molasses. And for light treacle, also called golden syrup, you could make your own sugar syrup with a little bit of acid in it. But that's going to have to be a whole other episode. Sugar is another topic that is, shall we say, excitingly complex. Today's episode is based on the article, Great British Baking Terms, Know Your Scones From Your Biscuits, on HowStuffWorks.com, written by Dave Ruse. BrainStuff is a production of iHeart Podcasts in partnership with HowStuffWorks.com and is produced by Tyler Klang. For more shows from iHeart Podcasts, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
