In a previous article, I explained why Americans call the British biscuit (a sweet biscuit) a “cookie.” In this article, I’m going to explain the opposite. Why do the British call the cookie a biscuit? As I previously explained, the word cookie came from a Dutch word for “little cakes” and got its start in New Amsterdam which became New York. New York became such an important city that the word cookie became the standard word for all such baked goods. Before this, cookies would have been called biscuits, just like they still are today in England. Let’s look at the origin of the word biscuit and while we’re at it, figure out how the term “cracker” came into the mix.
Origin of the Word Biscuit
The English word biscuit came from the Old French bescuit, which literally meant “twice cooked.” The bis part meant “twice” and the –cuit part was derived from the Latin coctus, meaning “cooked.” Coctus was the past participle of the verb couqere meaning “to cook.” The Italian word biscotti is also related. Biscuit, originally, would have referred to any type of hard, flat, and crisp bread, whether sweet or not.
Cracker Etymology
At some point, Americans not only were referring to sweet biscuits as cookies, but began calling unsweetened biscuits, anything hard, flat, and crisp, crackers. This seems confusing when people try to relate the word for say, a saltine, with the word referring to “mean white folks” usually of Scots-Irish descent, who settled on the frontiers of the Virginias, Carolinas, Maryland, and Georgia. It’s also associated with “cracking the whip” and to “cracking corn.” However, the word originally came from Elizabethan England and was used to describe a braggart or boaster.
The word “crack” in Middle English referred to entertaining conversation, and today we still crack jokes. However, the word for the food, whether related to this or not, did not originate in America. Americans developed very specific classifying labels for two different sorts of biscuits. Thin, hard, flat, and crispy biscuits became crackers, while the more luxurious and sweetened biscuits became cookies.
In England, the word was an overriding term used to describe all such products. But this does not mean that there were no more specific names for specific products such as the “cream cracker,” which contained no cream, and was an Irish invention.
The soda cracker, an American product, predates the cream cracker, and, as we shall see, the word cracker, in the United States, predates the word biscuit as well.
The word biscuit got to England via the French, who had, as mentioned above, gotten it from the Romans. When the word came into the French language it is hard to say. However, the word did not really come to America, via England, until around the middle of the 19th century. Before this time, the word biscuit had never been applied to these products, in the states. On the other hand, some American bakers began to produce products called crackers in the late 18th century.
These were hard, flat, plain, unsweetened but crisp products that became very popular and in demand. The great demand for these crackers even occurred overseas, but the cracker designation was promptly dropped and they were absorbed into the generic “biscuit” classification. The name cracker lived in the in the United States, however.
The Southern Soft Biscuit
No discussion of the word biscuit can fail to mention the Southern biscuit, which adds to the confusion, being a soft leavened bread instead of a hard cracker, highly perishable, and completely misnamed, at least by etiological standards, being definitely not twice-baked.
Today’s Southern biscuit probably originated with the Beaten biscuit, which is claimed to have come from either Maryland or Virginia (close enough). These were unleavened breads made simply with flour, lard, and milk. The dough was beaten, with a special axe, wooden mallet, or other implement for up to 30 minutes.
Since there was available yeast, no baking soda, having not been invented yet, and certainly no baking powder, cooks were looking for a way to help bread rise. The only viable chemical choice was pearl ash, which is actually potassium carbonate. To get pearl ash, you had to pour water over wood ashes and then collect the solid that was left. It so happens that this process is also used to make lye. What happens when you add lye to animal fat? You get soap. So what happened when they used pearl ash to leaven bread that contained lard? They got a bitter, soapy taste.
The solution was pounding the dough, folding it over, pounding it some more, and repeating, until tiny air pockets formed in the dough, basically like blisters. Then, when the dough was baked off, the air in these pockets heated and expanded, thus expanding the pockets, and thus the bread.
This, of course, did not result in a light fluffy product like we have today, but something between a cracker and a biscuit. Despite the shortening effect of the lard, the heavy working of the dough developed the gluten in the flour to such an extent that the product would be much denser than today’s product.
You don’t have to be a historian to imagine what happened next. Baking soda, and, eventually, baking powder, became available, replacing the beating process, and creating the light Southern biscuit, which has the same ingredients as the beaten biscuit, with the addition of baking powder (or baking soda and buttermilk). Since the dough did not have to be worked much a much lighter and softer product resulted.
In the next article, I explain about how “hard tack” or “ship’s bread” comes into the discussion and what it has to do with crackers.
