Eating is never easy.Take what is known as a cookie in America and a cookie in Britain: two small, usually sweet treats that sometimes overlap and sometimes don't. As modest as they are, these foods are inextricably linked to gigantic ideas in the history of both countries: the expansion of empire, the Industrial Revolution, waves of immigration, slavery, labor, nationalism. It's honestly not a stretch to say that the cookie, if you count its predecessors, is one of the most important foods in human history.
The biscuit's ancestors are among the earliest prepared foods in the world. At its core, this is a paste of some sort of flour and some sort of liquid, spread quite flat and cooked until dry. Essentially every culture had a version of this, made with whatever flour they could grow and process. Such items were portable, long-lasting sources of calories. These hard, flat cookies use ground millet, sorghum, peas, and finally wheat, which are then rehydrated when it's time to eat. Usually they were baked twice: once to cook them, at a relatively high temperature, and then again for a longer period of time at a lower temperature to dry them out completely. It is probably the earliest examplebappir, a Sumerian bread dating from about the third millennium BC, made from barley and wheat. Interestingly enough, it was not actually eaten, but used as a kind of shelf-stable beer starter. However, that would change.
Then there isthe month, from northern India, a hard, round, unleavened cracker, probably very old, usually served with lentils. Greek shepherds got theirs soakedplug, made from barley, in water and olive oil. It is clear that this type of food has an almost universal and very ancient history. That said, recipes and even useful descriptions of early cookies are difficult to come by. This was generally the food of the poor, and for most of history those who wrote had little interest in documenting anything to do with the poor. “The early history of biscuits is largely unwritten,” says Annie Gray, a British food historian. “We know they are there, we know people must have eaten them, but we don't actually know what they are made of, how they were used or whether they were baked at home or bought from bakeries.”
This type of food quickly became associated with the military, just like the original MREs. Soldiers could carry cookies with them for extended periods of time and either eat them as is (not very pleasant) or soak them in water or whatever soup, wine, beer, or other liquid they had nearby. Crackers like these aren't particularly nutritious if they're made from wheat, but they are filling and calorie-dense, and their virtue lies more in stability than anything else.
In English, these crackers eventually became known as "hardtack" when used in military or reconnaissance environments. But the most common name in many European countries was derived from Latincooked twice, or "twice baked." This is where we get both 'cookies' and 'biscotti'. The name turns out to be more figurative than it sounds: British military hardtack was baked four times and modern British biscuits are baked only once.
There is a parallel development of the biscuit that begins sometime before the seventh century. Sugar processing, first developed in India from sugar cane, soon entered the Abbasid Caliphate, which would eventually be established in Baghdad. It was then, in what is sometimes called the Golden Age of Islam, that cookies were first sweetened with sugar. And that made the difference.
There were many sweeteners around the world before sugar. In continental Europe and England, honey was the sweetener of choice, and it was not suitable for biscuits. “Honey is hygroscopic, meaning a dough sweetened with it will attract water,” writes Lizzie Collingham in her excellent book,The Biscuit: the story of a very British indulgence. “For example, cookies sweetened with honey quickly become soggy, defeating the purpose of making them.” So in England, biscuits remained plain and unsweetened for centuries, made from wheat in the south and oats in the north. Meanwhile, in Baghdad, sugar was used in all kinds of foods. The sweet cookies were often shaped like military rings, which were easy to string together and take with you on long journeys.
Sugar slowly flowed westwards into Europe, and there are records of sugar in small quantities – for the very wealthy – in the Middle Ages. It wasn't until 1641 that the English finally discovered a way to get enough of it into their country. This was when the English established sugar cane plantations in Barbados, which had a similar climate to the South Pacific, where it was first domesticated. From these plantations worked by slaves, sugar eventually flowed to England. The island played a prominent role in the slave trade for a long time.
Before this, biscuits were still common in England as an economical, sustainable food for the poor, although no actual recipes for burger biscuits from this era exist. Gray says they were likely the precursors to what we now know as water crackers or water crackers. Military hardtack, meanwhile, had become one of the most hated foods in the British Empire, and with good reason.
The British hardtack industry lagged woefully behind those of other European powers. Spain and Portugal both had sophisticated infrastructure for baking cookies for their navies and explorers, contracting with private bakers and supplying them to explorers and traders. England was a few decades later in global maritime travel than the Spanish and Portuguese, and their idiots couldn't have helped the matter.
In England, cuts were made where possible. One of the best-known examples is the nickname "limey", which stems from the fact that the English navy eventually swapped the standard treatment for scurvy, lemons, for the cheaper limes grown in the British colonies. (It turns out that limes contain significantly less vitamin C than lemons, and scurvy quickly became a problem again.) These cuts extended to crackers. The flour was at best of the lowest possible quality, and accusations were made that it had been adulterated with chalk and even less salty, non-food materials. English hardtack was notorious for softening during travel, causing weevil maggots to crawl out. By the mid-18th century, British biscuits were so bad that they were becoming a legitimate national security problem. Sailors were weak and died because their staple food had spoiled. Soft biscuits became indelibly associated with weevils, death and unclean conditions.
By the time the British began fighting Napoleon, the Navy had cracked down and established huge biscuit factories using new steam technology. They were, writes Collingham, one of the first industrially produced products in the world.
While the military was figuring out how to do hardtack in a non-tedious way, other big changes were happening in England. Tea made its debut in the 1760s, along with a civil war, the beheading of the king, a plague and repeated wars with the Dutch. As they entered the 18th century, the first sparks of the Industrial Revolution began to draw workers from the fields to the factories. Perhaps even more important to this discussion, the actual time employees ate began to change. Before then, the biggest meal of the day in England was around noon or a little later, in the middle of the working day. But as workers moved further away from home and the availability of sunlight became less important for working, this meal was moved later and later, eventually settling in the area. 6 p.m., where workers could enjoy a real home-cooked meal. The upper class also had less work than ever before and more nightly entertainment in the rapidly growing cities, which also meant they ate much later.
But there was a problem: lunch had not yet been invented. This is where tea comes into the picture, and with it the biscuit. Tea and biscuits were an early combination for the working class. A cracker is, as always, a good source of cheap, reliable fuel. Afternoon tea became common until it also moved later in the afternoon, under pressure from the actual meal which became lunch. This is also the great age of nationalism, when polities around the world decided that they should be countries with proper borders and a common language, a ruler and a flag, rather than some sort of loose cultural and geographical blob under a king . Tea, which couldn't have been less English considering where it actually grows (with India and China at the top of the list), became an important national symbol. It was almost a boast of imperial power to make your national drink something that grew thousands of miles away. And the cookie was always there, the teen's partner.
From this point on, the British biscuit evolves from something purely utilitarian to something increasingly luxurious, containing more sugar, cut in increasingly delicate and intricate ways, flavored with chocolate and spices. Cookie companies then were almost like tech companies are now: They announced a new cracker, which was rarely that different from an older cracker, and marketed it aggressively. They competed mercilessly for market share. Britain had gone from having the worst biscuit in the world to having the best (at least by British standards).
I VS, tingwas different. Back when the country had a vast, far-flung empire of its own, there were better solutions to the problem of non-perishable seafood than crackers, the canned stuff. (Though military MREs often include some kind of cracker, even today.) Even the word "biscuit," which in Britain applies to any hard, thin, bread-like product, was gone, thanks to the American penchant for diligent tossing Britishism in the dustbin.
Hardtack was still common in the US military and fishing empires. In New England it was sometimes called "sea cracker" or "pilot bread" and a slightly better version of hardtack was made there. A baker in Newburyport, Massachusetts, named John Pearson, made a thinner cracker called the Crown Pilot cracker. This was the first great American cookie. It resembled a hard cookie, but thinner and more fragile, while still maintaining longevity. Pearson's bakery would be swallowed up by a new conglomerate of independent bakeries. In 1898 it was called the National Biscuit Company, later shortened to Nabisco.
The term 'biscuit' comes from a very different root, both culinary and etymological, than the British biscuit. It is not correct to say that 'biscuit' is the British word for 'biscuit' or vice versa, as there are different ancestors at play here. The word 'cookie' comes from Dutchkage, which means "cake". Dutch also has a diminutive:cookieor "little pie". With the greatest influence of the Dutch in New Amsterdam it was the Dutch word that was Americanized to "cookie".
American cookies vary quite dramatically. An Oreo is crunchy and soft, while a Toll House-style chocolate chip cookie is gooey and soft. American cookie culture evolved rapidly thanks to new technology: electric mixers, widely available leavening agents, easy access to previously expensive spices and additives like chocolate.
One big difference, however, is that Americans have not had a long and sometimes maggot-ridden history with crackers. By the time America was America, the cookie was already well established as a treat, not a survival tool. Hardtack also has a history in the United States, especially around the Civil War. But it was never really associated with sweets through evolution or chance, as it was in Britain. The new cookie tradition was simply dessert.
We should probably mention the American cookie here, which is usually associated with the American Southeast. It is completely different from a biscuit or a British biscuit, but is instead a soft, quick bread. Quick breads, including Irish soda bread and cornbread, are unleavened breads that use a leavening agent, such as baking soda. They came about because of the high price of yeast. How the term "cookie" came to be applied to a soft, quick bread that is baked only once is a mystery. Somehow the word for one bread product ended up being applied to the other, even though they had little in common.
Back to cookies! If there's one thing that sets the American cookie apart from the British cookie, it's the idea that a cookie should always be crispy. This comes from the hardtack tradition where if a cookie was soft, it would spoil. This remains true today; while an American watchedThe great British bake-off(The Great British Bakeshowin America, for some reason), Judge Paul Hollywood's obsession with the "snap" of a cookie seems strangely compulsive. From an American perspective, some cookies break and others don't, but that certainly can't be applied as a general rule. “I don't agree with him that a cracker has to crack,” says Gray. “A soggy cookie is a stale cookie; if it has softened a little, you know it is not fresh. So I think there are a lot of signals of goodness and freshness with the snapper.” It's hardly a standard that makes sense for an oatmeal raisin cookie. Some cookies are crunchy because they are tasty. Some are sticky because it's tasty too.
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