Biscuits are something we all take for granted and I am partial to a few favourites myself with a cuppa. They are as popular as ever, you only have to look at the entire aisles of supermarkets dedicated to enticing us to pop some in our trolleys. Of course they are up there on top of the bad food list for ages now with all those calories and the ease with which we can scoff whole packets of them in one go if we are let loose on them or in the mood. With the arrival of shrinkflation no wonder they can be polished off even more quickly now.
They have been around a for a long time with the Romans giving us the name literally meaning twice cooked dough so that it was crispy and dry and would therefore keep longer as well. Savoury ship biscuits became an essential foodstuff in the Middle Ages with the industrial development of commercial and military sailing and the need to have food that would last the long journeys without refrigeration. At the same time the kitchens of Europe went into overdrive creating local types to satisfy the sweet teeth of the masses and they became cookies for the Americans.
Recipe wise they were as simple as just flour and water at the outset but infinite variations followed and not just cooked in ovens but thinly fried on hot plates giving wafers or deep fried in oil making crackers. Again, the Romans were the pioneers adding nuts, fruit, honey and spices to really up the standards.
The addition of raising agents and eggs then led the biscuit into lighter sponge type formats and subsequent production in nineteenth century factories were able to churn them out on a massive scale for cheaper prices. Eventually biscuits did not need to be twice baked but were ready in just the single cooking process and fittingly called short cakes and shortbread biscuits came from this.
The enrichment with butter as it became more wide spread and affordable was the final luxurious touch to complete the formula and biscuits have never looked back. The problem now of course is that butter has been mostly replaced by all those suspect fats and this is where the latest nutritional damage is really done as the race to produce them as cheaply as possible continues unabated.
A more recent ingredient to the biscuit recipe was chocolate, only really becoming available in the middle of the twentieth century. The irony is with the tripling of world cocoa prices of late that this ingredient might be seen less and less in biscuit world unless you are prepaid to pay for the continued indulgence of having your favourite chocolate biscuit. I certainly do like a good chocolate biscuit so there will be no holding me back on that front.
In Ireland we have some generational favourites like Jacobs, our original nineteenth century biscuit maker from Waterford who eventually conquered the UK market too. Their associated Boland’s Mills kimberly mikado and coconut cream brands I would have had as a child and still enjoy today as well as bourbon creams. I would not be a fan of their legendary fig rolls.
The other standout biscuits in Ireland are still the likes of Jaffa cakes, hob nobs, jammie dodgers, chocolate fingers, chocolate chips cookies, digestives, custard creams and not forgetting the ginger nut which contain no nuts at all ironically as they were originally so small they actually looked like a nut and the name then stuck.
The matter of dunking is a whole other subject which cannot be avoided in any biscuit discussion and like most people I do like a good dunk which is a fine art in itself with size, age and texture of the biscuit being measured against volume, temperature and strength of the tea with your timing needing to be impeccable. After going to all that trouble to make biscuits crunchy we go and soften them again, now that definitely takes the biscuit.
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