Biscuit (bread)

American English and British English use the same word to refer to two distinctly different modern foods. Early hard biscuits (United States: cookies) were derived from a simple, storable version of bread.[6] The word "biscuit" itself originates from the medieval Latin word biscoctus, meaning "twice-cooked".

The modern Italian baked goods known as biscotti (also meaning "twice-cooked" in Italian) most closely resemble the Medieval Latin item and cooking technique.

As the English language developed, different baked goods ended up sharing the same name. The soft bread is called a biscuit in North America, and the hard baked goods are called biscuits in the UK.

The differences in the usage of biscuit in the English speaking world are remarked on by Elizabeth David in English Bread and Yeast Cookery. She writes,

It is interesting that these soft biscuits are common to Guernsey, and that the term biscuit as applied to a soft product was retained in these places, and in America, whereas in England it has completely died out.[7]

Early European settlers in the United States brought with them a simple, easy style of cooking, most often based on ground wheat and warmed with gravy.[6] Most were not wealthy men and women, and so it was a source of cheap nutrition. A very similar practice was also popular once with the Royal Navy as hard, flour-based biscuits would keep for long journeys at sea but would also become so difficult to chew that they had to be softened up. These were first introduced in 1588 to the rations of ships and found their way into the New World by the 1700s at the latest.

The biscuit emerged as a distinct food type in the early 19th century, before the American Civil War. Cooks created a cheaply produced addition for their meals that required no yeast, which was expensive and difficult to store. With no leavening agents except the bitter-tasting pearlash available, beaten biscuits were laboriously beaten and folded to incorporate air into the dough which expanded when heated in the oven causing the biscuit to rise. In eating, the advantage of the biscuit over a slice of bread was that it was harder, and hence kept its shape when wiping up gravy in the popular combination biscuits and gravy.

In 1875, Alexander P. Ashbourne patented the first biscuit cutter in the United States, useful for making cookies, cakes, or baking powder biscuits.[8][9] It consisted of a board to roll the biscuits out on, which was hinged to a metal plate with various biscuit cutter shapes mounted to it.

1948 ad for Ballard Biscuits as described.

Southern chefs may have had an advantage in creating biscuits. Northern American all-purpose flours, mainly grown in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, are made from the hard spring wheats that grow in the North's cold-winter climate. Southern American bleached all-purpose flours, originally grown in the Carolinas, Georgia and Tennessee before national food distribution networks, are made from the soft winter wheat that grows in the warm Southern summer. This summer growth results in wheat that has less protein, which is more suited to the creation of quick breads, as well as cookies, cakes and muffins.[10][11]

Pre-shaped ready-to-bake biscuits can be purchased in supermarkets, in the form of small refrigerated cylindrical segments of dough encased in a cardboard can. These refrigerator biscuits were patented by Ballard and Ballard in 1931.[6]