is a word which covers a vast range of flour-based items, generally small in size, thin, and short or crisp in texture. A more precise definition is difficult, as Garrett (c.1898) discovered; he concluded that a crisp or brittle texture was the only shared characteristic and that ‘Pastrycooks and confectioners, both British and foreign, appear to have mutually agreed to retain this feature as the only one necessary to distinguish a tribe of kinds which differ from each other in almost every other particular’. However, he had reckoned without N. America, where ‘biscuit’ means a soft, thick scone-type product, and the words cookie and cracker are used for items similar to English biscuits. (In modern Britain the application of the word ‘biscuit’ to breads which are soft and fresh has survived on Guernsey, and in the north-east of Scotland, where ‘soft biscuits’ are flat buns made from bread dough kneaded with butter and sugar. This is possibly the origin of the N. American habit of referring to scones as biscuits.)
Apart from considerations of size and texture, a biscuit is also defined to a certain extent by usage. Biscuits rarely form part of a formal meal except when cheese is served. They are mostly eaten as snacks and served as offerings of hospitality, together with drinks. They may be sweet or savoury, are simple to make in quantity, and keep well when stored.
The name ‘biscuit’ is derived from the Latin panis biscoctus, ‘bread twice cooked’. This name was applied to such products as rusks, made from plain dough baked in a loaf, cooled, sliced, and then dried in gentle heat to give a crisp, dry product which kept well. Double cooking was also used for ship's biscuit, a durable staple food made from stiff flour and water dough for sailors on long voyages and armies on campaign. The Italians produced this type of panis biscoctus commercially in the Middle Ages. The English equivalent was a hard and unattractive food. Froissart in his Chronicles (about 1400) writes enviously of Scottish soldiers who carried bags of oatmeal and made themselves delicious fresh oatcakes instead wherever they camped.
Other methods not requiring an oven were devised for producing crisp products from flour and water; one was to cook the mixture in a thin layer on a heated plate to make a wafer. These were popular in the Middle Ages and, in various forms, still are. The method of deep frying is even more ancient. The Romans made thin sweet biscuits in this way; one of the few recipes of Apicius to deal with this branch of cookery describes how a thick paste of fine wheat flour was boiled and spread out on a plate. When cooled and hardened it was cut up and fried until crisp, then served with honey and pepper. This biscuit is made of a mixture similar to the Roman pasta known as lagani (see lasagne), whose name may have passed down (possibly via the Arabic lauzinaj) to the medieval lozenge, for which a thin sheet of dough made from flour, water, sugar, and spices was cut into pieces and fried.
The boiling and frying technique remained in use in the Middle Ages for making cracknels, which were small, crisp, sweet biscuits. They continued to be made well into the 19th century (and bequeathed their name to a sort of brittle toffee filling for chocolates). The simnel was another medieval product, which was boiled first and then baked. It was thicker than a cracknel, and resembled a sweet bread. In the 17th century the original simnel died out and the name was transferred to simnel cake.
Sweetened, spiced mixtures of the gingerbread and honey cake type have been popular in Europe for centuries. Over the years, thinner versions such as British ginger biscuits and German Lebkuchen developed.
Another special category of rich sweet biscuit popular since the late Middle Ages is that of confections aerated with foamed egg whites, in which the flour is partly or wholly replaced with ground nuts (see nut biscuits; macaroon; etc.).
The discovery that beaten egg was an effective aerating agent gave rise to several types of biscuit (usually spelt ‘bisket’) popular in the 17th and 18th centuries. Foamed egg white, or whole egg, and sugar were mixed with fine flour and baked in small thin rounds or fingers, or baked in a roll, sliced, sugared, and dried like a rusk. These progenitors of modern meringues and of sponge biscuits (see boudoir biscuits) passed under many names, but towards the end of the 17th century the recipes had become codified. ‘Italian’ biscuit, based on egg whites alone, was an early form of meringue. Savoy biscuit, which originated in France sometime early in the 17th century, appeared in English recipe collections in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. It was made from whisked eggs and sugar, mixed with flour. A number of other ‘biscuits’ based on similar ingredients but mixed in a slightly different order also appeared: Lisbon biscuits, Naples biscuits, and Spanish biscuits, given in 18th-century cookery books, were all of this type. ‘Common biscuit’ was an egg, sugar, and flour biscuit flavoured with a spice such as coriander, rosewater, or sack.
Another popular 17th- and 18th-century biscuit was the jumble, or knot, made from a light mixture of eggs, sugar, and flour and rosewater or aniseed.
A new French croquant (crunchy) biscuit reached Britain around 1600. It was based on flour, sugar, and egg whites. Several kinds of very light egg white biscuits made of a mixture similar to that of croquant are of long standing in Europe. These include the various thin biscuits such as the French tuile, curved into a tile shape while still soft after cooking.
Flat, pastry-type products, baked only once, were known in the 16th century as ‘short cakes’. They were made of rich shortcrust pastry with added eggs, leavened with a little yeast but kept thin. (Yeast always presented a problem in biscuit-making, since it was likely to give an uneven rise. ‘Docking’—pricking holes in the rounds—was one method of dealing with this. Many modern biscuit varieties still have these holes.) In the north of England short cake mixtures were pressed into moulds to make funeral biscuits (see funeral food) which were given to the mourners at a burial. Both short and croquant mixtures—as well as puff pastry—were used for making flat biscuits to be eaten by themselves, and as a base for mixtures of dried fruit and other sweet things. Biscuits based on mixtures in which butter and sugar were creamed together probably developed during the 18th century.
In Britain the relative importance of the basic biscuit mixtures changed greatly during the following two centuries. That of rusks diminished, and fried biscuits died out (although in parts of Europe, the Middle East, and India frying continues to be an important method for cooking biscuit batters). Spiced biscuits remained popular and were influenced by shortened mixtures. Nut biscuits, always a select delicacy, became a specialized branch of biscuit-making, verging on sugar confectionery. Sponge finger biscuits continued to be made after the larger sponge cake became a separate variety in the 18th century.
Enriched ‘short cakes’ became much more important, developing into many regional English biscuit specialities such as Derbyshire wakes cakes (flavoured with currants, caraway seeds, and lemon zest), Goosnargh cakes (from Lancashire, flavoured with caraway), Shrewsbury cakes (flavoured with cinnamon), and all biscuits based on a short pastry mixture such as modern shortbread and digestive biscuits. Rich short butter-based doughs are also specialities of C. and N. Europe.
Cheese-flavoured biscuits have their origins in medieval cheese tarts and pastries; but the totally plain, unsweetened biscuit for eating with cheese did not come into use until the 18th century. An early British plain biscuit was the Bath Oliver (see biscuit varieties). Plain biscuits also developed into fancy salted crackers, ‘cocktail biscuits’ for nibbling at drinks parties.
In France, because sailors used so many biscuits, the great seaport of Nantes became associated with biscuit production, especially in the 19th century. Famous biscuits made here include petit beurré; paille d'or, a very fragile biscuit, enclosing raspberry jelly between two wafers; and the round beurré nantais.
During the 19th century supplies of cheap sugar and flour, plus chemical raising agents such as bicarbonate of soda, led to the development of many sweet biscuit recipes. In Britain several entrepreneurs laid the foundations of the modern biscuit industry. The firms of Carrs, Huntley & Palmer, and Crawfords were all established by 1850. Since the mid-19th century the range of commercially baked biscuits based on creamed and pastry type mixtures has expanded to meet demand, and accounts for the majority of biscuits sold under brand names in Britain today. Chocolate-coated biscuits, however, only became a lucrative business after the Second World War.
See also biscuit varieties, and in addition: banketbakkerij; beaten biscuits; boudoir biscuits; brandy snaps; cookie; cracker; ginger biscuits; gingerbread; honey cake; jumbles; Lebkuchen; macaroon; nut biscuits; oatcake; paximadia; rusk; savoy; ship's biscuit; shortbread; sponge cake; Springerle; tuile; wafer; water biscuits; some of which have already been signposted above in particular contexts.
Laura Mason has written about several aspects of British food in books including Sugar Plums and Sherbet (1998), Farmhouse Cookery (2005), and Traditional Foods of Britain (1999), which she co-authored with Catherine Brown.
