Calling all smart cookies! National Biscuit Day offers the perfect chance to go crackers about one of the world’s most popular snacks. But did you realize just how many types of biscuits there are?
Biscuits in the US are flaky, savory and buttery, similar to scones and often served at breakfast or as a side dish. However, in the UK, the word “biscuit” is used for flat sweet treats (“cookies” in the US).
How to Celebrate National Biscuit Day
As you might imagine, celebrating National Biscuit Day is a lot of fun. It is your yearly excuse to eat as many biscuits as you like – and to do a spot of baking.
Bake Some Biscuits
Baking an ancient Roman biscuit called a buccellum is perhaps the most exciting way to experience the day. While the final product won’t be as delectable as manufactured biscuits, it will give you an insight into the sort of cuisine that people enjoyed in the past while sailing.
Failing that, nothing is stopping you from baking cookies or traditional biscuit bread. What’s more, you could trial unique, healthy versions using authentic ingredients. There are plenty of recipes that still use wholemeal flours and sugar alternatives on the internet.
Traditionally biscuits come in particular sizes and shapes. Still, there’s no need to stick with the official format if you don’t want to. Cookies don’t have to be round. If you’ve got some shape cutters at home, put them to good use. You can make cookies in the shape of donkeys, cars, stars, hearts, triangles – whatever you have to hand. And for extra fun, you can cover them in sugar!
Enjoy Biscuits with Tea
Biscuits are an experience that you’ll want to share. Many people, therefore, invite family and friends over for an afternoon of cookies and tea enjoyed in the traditional style. Just take your favorite type of tea (Assam, Darjeeling, and so on), add a spot of milk, some sugar, and then pair with your favorite biscuits – sweet or savory! Many people like to dunk their biscuits in their tea.
So bake up a treat for friends and family, or settle down with a cup of tea or coffee and enjoy one of your favorite varieties. Don’t forget to share your creations with your friends on social media. You never know what other biscuit fanatics are lurking out there.
National Biscuit Day Timeline
Persian Cooks Sweeten Biscuits
Bakery traditions in the early Islamic Persian world introduce enriched doughs with sugar, nuts, and spices, creating some of the first recognizably sweet biscuits and cookies.
First Recorded Use of “Biscuit” in English
The Middle English word “bisket,” derived from Old French “bescuit” and Latin “bis coctus” (twice cooked), appears in records to describe hard, dry baked goods suitable for storage.
Ship’s Biscuit Feeds the Elizabethan Navy
During the Anglo-Spanish War, English sailors in the fleet facing the Spanish Armada were issued daily rations of hard, dry “ship’s biscuit” as a durable staple food at sea.
American Civil War Popularizes Hardtack
Union and Confederate armies rely on hardtack, a simple flour-and-water biscuit, as a key field ration, cementing its place in military food history despite its notorious toughness.
McVitie’s Begins Baking Digestive Biscuits in Scotland
Scottish baker Robert McVitie’s firm starts producing digestive biscuits, which soon become a popular semi-sweet “health” biscuit and a classic companion to tea in Britain.
Creation of the National Biscuit Company in the United States
Several American bakeries merged to form the National Biscuit Company (later Nabisco), helping to standardize and mass-produce packaged biscuits and crackers across the country.
Southern-Style Baking Perfects the Fluffy American Biscuit
In the U.S. South, soft winter wheat flour, buttermilk, and chemical leaveners like baking powder and soda evolve into the tender, flaky biscuits that become a staple of regional cuisine.
History Of 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!
Surprising Facts About Biscuits Through History
For centuries, sailors relied on rock-hard “ship’s biscuits” or hardtack as a primary ration because they could keep for years if kept dry.
Made from just flour, water, and sometimes salt, they were baked multiple times until almost completely moisture-free, which made them resistant to mold and bacteria but so hard that crews often had to soak them in water, brine, or stew before eating.
A Biscuit Once Fed Both Arctic Explorers and Museum Visitors
Some of the earliest mass-produced ship’s biscuits came from Victorian firms like Huntley & Palmers, whose products accompanied British polar expeditions in the 19th century.
One preserved biscuit from the 1875–76 British Arctic Expedition, stamped with the company name, later ended up in the collections of the National Maritime Museum as a tangible reminder of how basic baked rations supported extreme exploration.
The Word “Biscuit” Literally Means “Twice Cooked”
The English word “biscuit” comes from the Latin “bis” (twice) and “coquere” (to cook), reflecting an early method in which bread dough was baked, then returned to the oven at a lower heat to dry out.
This double-baking technique long predated modern cookies and crackers and was a simple preservation technology used across Europe to produce travel-friendly foods.
American Biscuits Evolved from Simple Frontier “Soda Biscuits”
In the United States, the soft, fluffy biscuit developed in the 19th century as cheap wheat flour and chemical leaveners such as baking soda and, later, baking powder became widely available.
Frontier cooks could quickly stir together flour, fat, and leavening to create “soda biscuits,” a fast, filling bread that needed neither yeast nor long rising times and fit the needs of families constantly on the move.
British Biscuits Rose with Industrialization and Tea Culture
Sweet British-style biscuits became everyday items in the 19th century as industrial bakeries and improved rail transport allowed firms like Peek Freans and McVitie’s to distribute packaged biscuits nationwide.
Their growth coincided with the popularization of afternoon tea, turning small, durable baked goods into a standard accompaniment to tea breaks in both working-class factories and middle-class parlors.
Why Some Biscuits Snap and Others Crumble
Crisp, snappable biscuits and cookies typically contain a relatively low proportion of water and often more sugar and fat, which limit gluten development and encourage a brittle structure that breaks cleanly.
Softer, more cake-like versions hold more moisture and often rely on different sugar types and higher egg content, which plasticize the crumb and change how the baked dough fractures between the teeth.
