Little Miss Muffet, was a favourite rhyme of artists in the olden days, as they had fun illustrating it.   It first
appeared in print in 1805, in a book titled Songs for the Nursery.

No-one really knows when it was first written. One story goes that it was created by Dr. Thomas Muffet, a 16th century English entomologist, for his stepdaughters; another says that it was written for his daughter who hated spiders, while her father loved them!

Historians tell us a different tale - that it refers to Mary, Queen of Scots, who was said to have been frightened by John Knox, a Scottish religious reformer in the 16th century.

A "tuffet" is a small stool, often three-legged and topped with a cushion, or a tuft of earth and grass. Or the last name "Muffet" may be a play on the word "muffin", or simply invented to rhyme with "tuffet".

Little Miss Muffet could also mean a girl who is frightened too easily, of the smallest thing such as a spider!
In Jest What the Doctor Ordered, a humor book by Dr. Leo Francis Golden, this rhyme has been cleverly changed to deal with a weight-conscious theme:

Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet
Eating her curves away.

Some spiders are venomous, but they also help the ecosystem. In an English meadow it was found that each hectare contained about five million spiders! In such concentrations they consume many times the number of insects eaten by birds. It may be our best friend to control pests!

Miss Muffet's Curds and Whey Salad

Some of Mother Goose's rhymes have very old English words in them. Some people say a tuffet is a three-legged stool and others say it is a little grassy bump big enough to sit on. Did you know that curds and whey is an old word for cottage cheese? The curds are the lumpy parts and the whey is the milky part.

Equipment: mixing spoon, measuring cup

Ingredients (for each person):

1 leaf of lettuce (for the tuffet)
1/3 cup cottage cheese (for Miss Muffet's curds and whey)
1 prune (or raisin) (for the spider!)

Wash the lettuce under cold water and shake off the drops of water. Put it on a small plate. Measure 1/3 cup cottage cheese and put it on the lettuce. Put the prune on top of the cottage cheese. If you want a smaller spider, use a raisin on top of the cottage cheese. Even Miss Muffet wouldn't be afraid of this spider!

— from Mother Goose Cookbook, work-in-progress, c 1998, Gloria T. Delamar