When it comes to snacks, cookies are certainly the best choice for many people. But, having eaten cookies for so many years, do you really know them? Today, I’m going to talk to you about “cookies”.
The etymology of biscuits is “bread baked twice”, which is derived from the French words bis (to do it again) and cuit (to bake). It is baked with flour and water or milk without yeast.
More than 160 years ago, a British sailing ship sailing in the Bay of Biscay near France encountered strong winds and waves and unfortunately ran aground. The crew hurriedly lowered their small sampans to escape. When the wind stopped, they had to row to the big boat on a small sampan to carry food. However, all the flour, sugar, butter and other food stored in the large cabin were submerged by the sea, and it was impossible to tell what was fished up. They had to put the fish back to the island in a few bags, and then kneaded them into small balls and roasted them over the fire.
In this baking, a miracle happened: these things mixed together became mixed noodles, and they were fermented, and the baked dough was crunchy and delicious, and it was very delicious. The sailors fed their hunger on this baked dough until they were saved, and upon their return to England, in honor of their encounter in the Bay of Biscay, they baked many small cakes in the same way, and called them “biscuit”, or biscuit. Shrewd merchants follow this method and make such small cakes for sale, which is where the biscuits come from.
Here is also the origin of cookies: the word cookie comes from the medieval Dutch word (koekje), which means “little cake”. Americans coined the word “cookie” based on the Dutch pronunciation, which refers to home-cooked cookies.
In the era of backward baking equipment, pastry chefs at that time would first scoop a spoonful of cake batter, drop it on a baking tray and put it in the oven, and test whether the temperature and humidity of the oven meet the baking standards according to the degree of batter forming, this batter is called “little test cake”. The baked cake batter will be drier and harder than the cake when taken out, and in order to prevent waste, some people taste it and think it tastes good, so a new snack – cookies is born.
Don’t think Biscuit and Cookie are synonyms. In the United States and the United Kingdom, people will give very different answers. As mentioned earlier, in the United Kingdom, Biscuit is a collective term for all biscuits, especially all kinds of sweet biscuits, which can be classified as Biscuit. But in the U.S., Biscuit refers to a quick bread made with butter, flour and leavening agent, which can be made into savory side dishes with ingredients such as bacon and eggs, but it is not strictly a biscuit.
American biscuit is mostly found in the southern United States, and it tastes quite similar to British scones. The American term for all kinds of sweet biscuits is Cookie, but for the British people, Cookie refers to soft and sweet round biscuits, which often go hand in hand with afternoon tea.
