“They can’t be that different, they’re called the same thing!”
For your convenience: waffles, muffins, and biscuits, in the US and England.
I did take a few liberties with this, in the interest of making an awesome graphic:
- The “England” header should probably say UK, but Ireland, Scotland, and Wales have their own delicacies, and I’m not sure how they conflict with these definitions. Playing it safe.
- The British waffle is potato, and is generally eaten with sausages or bacon or baked beans (or all three!). (Baked beans, by the way, are not supposed to have brown sugar in them, you awful people.) Waffle is actually interchangeable and can mean either a potato waffle or a sweet waffle in England, but if someone says “waffle” they usually mean the potato kind.
- The American muffin is technically called an English muffin, which is equal parts ironic, ridiculous, and confusing. Muffin is also interchangeable in the US, and possibly in England (I’m sure we have English muffins like you guys, but I’d never eaten one before now).
- The American biscuit looks awful, and I do not ever want to eat one. What I call a biscuit, Americans call a cookie or a cracker. American cookies are also fairly common in the UK.
Images stolen from Wikipedia, mostly.
American biscuits are delicious, and not far off what you’d think of as a scone. And we have plenty of muffins like the british ones pictured, although we tend to prefer blueberry or chocolate to the more typically british wheat/pumpernickel/whatever.
