If you’ve ever encountered a biscuit in the USA, you’re encountering a round buttery bread-like thing that may have a buttermilk tang to it. Something similar to a scone, yet different because of the tang of the buttermilk. Something quite different from a scone in many ways, because scones originated as a bread product, while biscuits did not.
Of course, if you’re in the UK, you know that a biscuit is a flat-ish somewhat sweet thing that looks suspiciously like what we Americans call a “cookie”. It is entirely unlike an American biscuit. But here’s a secret: They both came from the same place.
In the beginning, there was ship’s biscuit or hardtack. Both Americans and British called it biscuit in 1776, when colonial independence happened. But then there was independence, and the flow of cooks — and cooking information in general — largely stopped between the US and UK.
So here’s the thing with hardtack: It’s hard. If you search this blog’s back archives you’ll find my attempt to make hardtack according to the American Civil War . Eating it required soaking it in soup or coffee or whatever for a significant amount of time. Coming up with a more edible version of ship’s biscuit became a desirable thing on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, a project that occurred during much of the 19th century, accelerating in the late 1800’s. Finally, by 1900, each side of the ocean arrived at their solution to ship’s biscuit being too hard to easily eat. On the American side of the Atlantic, those pesky colonials added baking soda, buttermilk, and fat to the basic ship’s biscuit recipe of flour and salt in order to arrive at the buttermilk biscuit. Meanwhile, on the UK side of the Atlantic, the British added a lesser amount of leavening agents as well as often other substances like egg and sugar to the basic ship’s biscuit recipe of flour and salt in order to arrive at, well, British biscuit — which look suspiciously like American cookies.
Wait, American cookies? What about them? It’s not a case of Americans calling biscuits cookies — we had cookies well before the British had biscuits that were cookie-like as vs ship’s biscuit (hardtack). We got cookies from the Dutch a hundred years before the British had biscuits that were cookie-like. The first reference to “cookies” on the soil of the USA is from 1703, when a reference in New Netherlands to a celebration talks about distributing cookies to the celebrants. Yup. We had cookies before the Brits had cookie-like biscuits.
Now, some claim that US biscuits are actually the same thing as UK scones. No. UK scones originated as a bread product made with baking powder and eggs rather than as a derivative of ship’s biscuit and are often sweet rather than savory and sometimes incorporate fruits. We eat scones here in the United States too, but they are not biscuits in either the American or UK usage. Scones are… scones.
And biscuits are biscuits. Not the same biscuits on the two sides of the Atlantic, but originating in the same place, with hardtack “ship’s biscuit”, with the same purpose, to make that “ship’s biscuit” actually edible without the need for a hammer and chisel. Americans spent a century after independence trying to make hardtack ship’s biscuit edible until finally arriving at the modern buttermilk biscuit in the late 1800’s, and the British did the same, but arriving at a different end product, and never the twain shall meet.
- Badtux the Culinary Penguin
Badtux the Snarky Penguin 