Making biscuits
That is not the way the cookie crumbles
I need to disappoint all the cat-loving readers. This article is about the edible kind, not the type cats make on their favourite things. Recently, I was at a restaurant when a familiar complaint occurred. A patron had ordered biscuits and was surprised when she was served a muffin-looking pastry. More correctly when choosing the sides, she decided against taking the fries.
Hardtack
I knew the story about hardtack. This is the same reason Napoleon is synonymous with canned food. Every growing empire wanted a way to preserve food for a long duration. A side effect of expanding empires is that the new borders outgrowing supply lines.
The benefit of hardtack was that it could be baked on land and stored onboard a ship to be consumed when necessary. The side effect of making it durable was that the biscuit had to be hard. This is the part that needs clarification. The hardtack a few centuries ago was teeth-breaking stuff. By the 20th century, the hardtack was biscuits made for the military and had little resemblance to the ancient cousins. They were still hard because there was a chance that harder military equipment would rest on the biscuits. An interesting fact is that Richard the First was eating biscuits during his crusade.
Confectionary biscuits
By the time I was born, biscuits were regarded as a sweet treat. If they were not sweet, there was a layer of stuffing to compensate. Incidentally, a sandwich biscuit with cream stuffing is called a bourbon. The same name as a type of American whiskey. A beverage that purists around the world argue about it being spelled with or without an e.
As such, I was in for a rude surprise when I was introduced to cream crackers. The concept of savory biscuits was an alien concept. Even my government-subsidised childcare never gave me any biscuits that were not sweet. I am sure that there was some education included with the child care but all I can remember was the toys and snacks.
My definition of a plain biscuit was an iced gem biscuit with the topping licked off. Incidentally, these decadent treats are more than a century old.
Cookies
Cookies and biscuits are different. For starters, nobody gets excited about homemade biscuits. In certain parts of the world, they are interchangeable like the government subsidized child care that I spent some of my childhood.
There was a little catch, especially with the Danish cookies, which came in lovely blue tins. Adults used to recycle the tins to store other inedible things. You can imagine my disappointment in discovering that most blue tins did not store cookies. It was even more upsetting to learn that those cookies were not imported from Denmark. That is why I agree with the French that only sparkling wine from a certain part of France can be called champagne.
Wafers
There are biscuits. Then there are wafers. The lightweight cousin to a featherweight snack. Wafers need an extra mention because I felt that it is a cost-cutting substitute for biscuits. It was my first introduction to the concept of form over substance.
Wafers did feature as part of government-subsidized child care. No surprise that it was my least favourite snack as it produced the most crumbs when eating. Unless the wafer is rolled. In those cases, it has somehow gained absolution. If the rolled wafer had chocolate, it instantly gained promotion to dessert. Unfortunately for me, neither rolled wafers nor rolled wafers dipped in chocolate made it onto my menu until I was in school.
Digestives
My first encounter with healthy eating. My mother purchased digestives because it did not have colourful packaging and it was sold as a healthier snack.
It was a surprise when I learned that some digestive biscuits had more sugar than plain biscuits. It was my first lesson that sugar-free, fat-free or cholesterol-free did not mean healthier. The plant symbol on the biscuit meant that it had some wholewheat flour. This led to my first discovery that healthy snacks meant eating things that tasted like cardboard.
All that healthy marketing was thrown out of the window when they unveiled their chocolate-covered digestive. It became my favourite snack as it still had a fig leaf of being healthy even if the snack was coated with a layer of chocolate. The fact that I gained weight during the years after it was introduced was probably a coincidence.