There really is no practical difference; the dictionary definition of a soup is:
a liquid food made by boiling or simmering meat, fish, or vegetables with various added ingredients.
Which also applies to any stew you can conceive of.
The technical, highly-nuanced difference is that of emphasis and intent. Stewing is a method of cooking the solids (specifically, a slow, moist-heat method). When you make a beef stew, you are stewing the beef, which says nothing about what you're stewing it in. On the other hand, when you make a chicken soup (or a chicken stock or broth which is the base of a chicken soup) then your objective is essentially to make chicken-flavoured liquid - to extract the flavour of the solids into the liquid. If some flavourful solids remain, then that is incidental as opposed to intentional.
In practice, some flavour extraction is going to happen with a stew as well, it just so happens that the principal aim is to cook the meat/veggies. A soup is more likely to contain raw or barely-cooked ingredients, and a stew is more likely to preserve the original flavour of the solids and/or liquids, but that's a very broad generalization and what it boils down to (ha ha) in practice seems to be largely dependent on the culture and the dish itself.
A stew is not simply a thick or chunky soup, despite the fact that a lot of people think of it that way. As above, that seems to be more common with stews, but it's not part of the definition, and the French have half a dozen categories for thickened soups that could easily be described as having the overall consistency of a "stew".
There is considerable overlap between cupcakes and muffins.
Method
From a technical point of view, muffins are made by the muffin method, making them small quickbreads. In the muffin method, the wet ingredients are combined in one bowl; and the dry ingredients are combined in another bowl. Then the two are quickly incorporated together with minimal mixing to avoid gluten development. This gives muffins a somewhat coarse crumb.
Cupcakes are small cakes, and are made by one of the traditional cake methods such as the creaming method, the reverse creaming method, the genoise method, the chiffon method, and so on. They tend to have a finer crumb than muffins.
Contrast
While no single criterion distinguishes a muffin from a cupcake if you do not adopt the technical definition above, the following trends exist:
- Cupcakes tend to be sweeter than muffins; there are savory muffins such as cornbread
- Cupcakes are often iced or frosted, whereas muffins tend to have no topping, or a simple crumb topping
- Cupcakes usually have a head or top no larger than the body of the cupcake; muffins are often encouraged to overflow their baking cup, so that their top is larger in diameter, giving them somewhat of a mushroom shape
- Cupcakes are almost always, well, cupcake shaped; muffins can be made as just muffin tops
- Cupcakes are almost never crispy or crunchy; muffins are often encouraged to brown and develop texture, especially on the tops
Best Answer
Suet is a particular fat from around the kidney area of cattle, it is not intramuscular.
I just learned from the other poster that adipose is considered a type of connective tissue, so from that perspective they are the same thing. However, I when chefs say it the fat would be something flavorful that you can render easily, and connective tissue would be a tough fibrous structural component that takes much longer to break down with heat. You can certainly feel the difference when you touch it, despite it not looking all that different in a photograph.
Here is a man separating connective tissue from suet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypRsO9KdxXk&t=190s