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Along with hot dogs, burgers and apple pie, the chocolate chip cookie is one of the stars of American comfort cuisine. Yet like many American foods, its origins lie elsewhere. And contrary to their contemporary reputation as items of indulgence, biscuits used to be seen as a health food.
The first biscuits were austere, little more than twice-baked slices of bread, made by ancient Greeks and Romans (the word “biscuit” in middle English means cooked twice). In the eighth or ninth century, Islamic confectioners decided to sweeten such creations by adding sugar, which at the time was seen as good for you, according to Lizzie Collingham in “The Biscuit: The History of a Very British Indulgence”. Biscuits entered the British culinary repertoire as a nutritional snack sometime around the 16th century, says Collingham. Featuring ingredients such as coriander and aniseed, they were seen as a “form of prophylactic against digestive orders”, a world away from the rich, b