National Biscuit Day

National Biscuit Day can only be understood in light of the background of biscuits!

Biscuits aren’t a modern invention but they were born of necessity in the ancient world. Merchants and military personnel in the Roman, Greek, and Egyptian empires would often spend many weeks at sea, ferrying cargo and making their way to foreign shores.

Hence, they needed a snack that would provide them with a source of calories for the entirety of the journey. Fresh food was out of the question. It just wouldn’t keep. So captains turned to stocking their larders with dried foods that wouldn’t go off.

Preservation techniques were already fairly advanced in ancient times. People knew that if you dried something out, it would last longer. Millers, therefore, began grinding up flours and then baking cooked bread on a low heat for an extended period. This technique helps to retain the nutrition, but removes the water content, preventing any microbes from thriving.

From that point, dried biscuit-like breads became a staple at sea. The ancient Egyptians, for instance, cooked up flat brittle loaves made of an old grain called millet. Later, the Romans created the first example of what we would recognizably call a biscuit. They spread wheat flour paste over a plate and then left it to dry and harden.

Eating biscuits at sea remained popular in the middle ages. In the sixteenth century, the Royal Navy provided its sailors with a daily allowance of a pound of cookies and a gallon of beer (yes, you did read that right!) to help them fight off the Spanish armada.

The modern conception (or should we say “confection”) of biscuits as sweet treats didn’t begin until the seventh century. The ancients saw them strictly as a travel food – something you’d take with you for long journeys that wouldn’t spoil.

But the Persians began to experiment. Instead of just making the flour into a paste with water, they began incorporating other ingredients like eggs, butter, and cream to improve the texture. They noticed that when you added these items to the mix, you wind up with fluffier, more luxurious delicacies. After a while, they introduced sweet things, like fruit and honey, creating the first cookies in history.

Biscuits arrived in Europe around the end of the tenth century. Legend has it that an Armenian monk traveled from central Asia to France and passed on a recipe he had learned in the Caucuses. The main flavor at the time was ginger.

Even so, these biscuits were still not the modern confections that we enjoy today. They were fluffy and tastier than their ancient forebears, but the mass production of sugar was still absent. For most of the middle ages, biscuits were a side-show – and exotic delicacy that people in some parts of the world enjoyed on occasion as part of their traditional cuisine.

Once sugar production ratcheted up in the eighteenth century, however, the game changed. Suddenly, flour-millers and bread makers could add sweetness to their mixes and create entirely new classes of products, all at a low cost.

By the 19th century, per capita sugar consumption rocketed, and biscuit firms like McVitie’s, Crawfords, and Carr’s all set up factories to mass-produce confections. While today, most biscuits for sale are sweet, savory varieties still make up a considerable chunk of overall sales,

National Biscuit Day is a celebration of biscuits of all forms – not just cookies, but also oatcakes, crackers, water biscuits, and crispbreads too!