Biscuits

Mmmmm..... recipe poetry ! You'll find 'Biscuits...' plated for you later on - specially selected to complement Terry's 'Tea' blog of a couple of days ago. Did you know biscuit means "twice cooked"? That's from the French (and ultimately the Latin) bis (twice) and cuit (cooked). It first appeared in Middle English (as bisquit) some time in the 14th century and refers to the fact that biscuits were originally cooked in a two-fold process. First they were baked and then they were dried out in a slow oven to optimal crumbly crispness.

eleven biscuits

Top eleven biscuits, according to your Saturday Blogger (and no arguments or dunking please):

01) Shortbread (fantail for preference)

02) Chocolate Digestive

03) Orange Club

04) Ginger Nut

05) Cocoa Rusk (Paximadakia Greek biscuit)

06) Nice

07) Custard Cream

08) Garibaldi

09) Choco Leibniz

10) Fig Roll

11) Bath Oliver

Recipe poetry though. This is actually my second attempt. The first one was about onion sauce, or sauce soubise to give it's fancy name. If so inclined, read it linked here: Know Your Onions. 

A recipe is a recipe, a poem is a poem. I suppose the real challenge is to avoid the trap of the banal in folding recipe  into poem. The aim surely must be to serve up something more resonant and rewarding than a metrical statement of ingredients and the procedure for preparation of whatever-it-is. I didn't think I'd quite achieved that goal with the onion sauce poem, so here goes for another bash. I hope it's not quite what you expected. Think of this perhaps as the first cooking...

Biscuits Of Empire

Pinch a coconut from old pink Kandy*

and desiccate the blighter. Set it aside.

Hack cane sugar from your plantation

or get your slaves to do so, bundle and

 

ride the cargo like that coconut across

half a world of seas to the old country.

Refine it, granulate and pulverise until

sweet powder and sickly wealth seeps

cross seaport and hinterland. Set all by.

Butter up some dairy maids, call on the

millers of the flat wheatfields of Anglia

for flours both plain and corn. The pull

of convenience is strong, soldiers away

on battle duty need sustaining stores so

the Army and Navy Co-Usable Society

stocks biscuits from British factories in

airtight tins, the cutting-edge of Empire

kept sweet with Nice, and it is also said 

the great Dominatrix, plump Victoriana

has an extravagance for them, traveling 

with a pack of Huntley & Palmers finest

wheresoever she goes, even into France.

Measure 300 flour 200 butter 100 sugar 

50 coconut it's a world-conquering ratio.

*archaic name for Ceylon/Sri Lanka

Thanks for eating, S ;-)