BISCUIT
Wild Word Friday!
My Great Grandma Clare made the best BISCUITs I’ve ever tasted. They were the melt-in-your-mouth kind of BISCUITs, and, because I never did get her recipe, I have spent my adult life trying to duplicate her masterpiece, without success.
So, as a tribute to my Great Grandma Clare, I decided take a journey back in history to find the origin of the word BISCUIT. Here’s my take — a storyteller’s point-of-view — on the history of the humble BISCUIT.
An American BISCUIT on the left, British BISCUITs on the right
Once upon a time, somewhere in Europe, poor Grinda, wife of Grok, had the misfortune of always overcooking her spelt cakes. (Spelt is one of the earliest types of cultivated grain.) She was the subject of malicious gossip among the other women in her village, who baked tender and golden spelt cakes.
No matter how hard she tried, Grinda overbaked her spelt cakes, and poor Grok lost his standing as lead hunter in the village because he had done such a poor job of choosing a wife.
One day when the men of the village were on an extended hunting trip, Grok noticed that, although Grinda’s spelt cakes were tough and hard, after a week or two they were still edible whereas the spelt cakes the other hunters brought from home were hairy with green mold and tasted terrible. Hmmmmmmm……
Grinda was suddenly the heroine of the village for her invention – over-baked cakes – and then all the other women of village began cooking their spelt cakes hard and tough, too. Voila! The BISCUIT was born.
Eventually this “twice-cooking” came to be used in France where the resulting cakes were called pain bescuit – “bread twice-cooked.” By the 1400s, the last part of this French phrase, bescuit, traveled to England where BISCUIT came to mean any kind of hard cookie.
No one really knows why in colonial America the dry hard BISCUIT morphed into baking powder BISCUITs like my great grandmother made, but here in the USA if you ask for a BISCUIT, you won’t get a cookie. You’ll get a soft thick round of quick-bread that tastes great with real butter and honey! (Especially if my Great Grandma Clare made them.)
Are you a fan of baking powder BISCUITs? Do you have a good recipe you’d be willing to share?
Blessings!
Sue
Sweet memories of left-over biscuits. Momma would slice them in half and then butter both pieces. A few minutes under the broiler made them crispy and then a little sprinkled sugar or apple jelly smeared on top made a snack worthy of two little princesses! We loved to sit on the little rug in front of the big heater and sip tea and eat biscuits!