Crumpets for tea is a treat I reckon. My mother always called them pikelets.
Crumpets are griddle cakes made from flour and yeast and are apparently an Anglo-Saxon invention. There is a Middle English reference to them in Wycliffe (1382). He mentions the "crompid cake". Early crumpets were hard pancakes cooked on a griddle without yeast, rather than the soft and spongy crumpets of the Victorian era and beyond.
The term itself may refer to a crumpled or curled-up cake, or be Celtic with links to the Breton, Cornish and Welsh words meaning a "thin, flat cake" (in Welsh crempog) a type of pancake.
In Britain crumpets are generally circular, roughly 8 centimetres (3 in) in diameter and 2 centimetres (3⁄4 in) thick. Their shape comes from being restrained in the pan/griddle by a shallow ring. They have a characteristic flat top with many small pores and a chewy and spongy texture. They may be cooked until ready to eat warm from the pan but are frequently left slightly undercooked so that they may be cooled and stored before being eaten freshly toasted. They are often eaten with a knob of butter (the only way as far as I am concerned) or an alternative, such as jam, honey, Marmite, etc.
A regional variation of the crumpet is the pikelet, whose name derives from the Welsh bara piglydd or "pitchy [i.e. dark or sticky] bread", later shortened simply to piglydd; the early 17th century lexicographer, Randle Cotgrave, spoke of "our Welsh barrapycleds". The word spread initially to the West Midlands, where it became anglicised as "pikelet" and subsequently to Cheshire, Lancashire, Yorkshire, and other areas of the north. The main distinguishing feature of the Welsh or West Midlands pikelet is that it contains no yeast as a raising agent, and was traditionally cooked without a ring, making it rather flatter or thinner than a crumpet.
