It was Quakers who were the pioneers in fancy biscuit-making, concerned in the manufacture of goods that could do no harm to anyone, free from adulteration and fairly priced. In the late 1830s Jonathan Dodgson Carr, a miller and baker of Carlisle, began to design machinery for cutting and stamping biscuits. By 1846 Carr’s of Carlisle, which believed it was the first to mechanise the process, was producing 400 tons of biscuits in a year. Another Quaker, miller and confectioner George Palmer, joined up with his cousin, Thomas Huntley, who made biscuits entirely by hand in his Reading shop; they built a small factory behind the shop and were producing biscuits early in the 1840s. Ten years later they were making biscuits containing butter, eggs, milk and flavourings, caraway, cinnamon, essence of lemon and orange flower. By 1870 they were the largest biscuit company in the world, making 120 varieties and claiming that their names Ginger Cob and the Osborne had been borrowed by others, including Carr’s. . . . . The rise of the fancy biscuit was due to the changes in meals and the time they were eaten, to the affluence of the middle classes and the spread of tea drinking. They were also amazingly convenient, sold in charming tins that could be re-used. Between 1840 and 1860, when large breakfasts were being eaten and people dined at five, lunch or luncheon was a snack of a beverage and bread and cold meats; biscuits easily fitted into this meal or as the other snack eaten before retiring to bed.[Colin Spencer, span class="book">British Food, 285]
A brief chronology of the biscuit based on Spencer’s British Food
c. 1750 Dr William Oliver (1695-1764) makes a medicinal biscuit to accompany medicinal waters at Bath.
1791 “Lemann’s of Threadneedle Street, London (founded in 1747) . . . brought out the first recorded non-medicinal biscuit to commemorate the marriage of the Duke of York in 1791.”
1833 The British Navy mechanizes the production of sea biscuits, a hard dry bread containing only flour and water.
Late 1830s Jonathan Dodgson Carr designs machinery for cutting and stamping biscuits.
1846 Carr’s of Carlisle produces 400 tons of biscuits a year.
c. 1860 Peek Frean & Co. established in Bermondsey making fancy biscuits.
1860s “Huntley and Palmer [have] 700 retailers in nearly 400 different towns throughout the British Isles.”
c. 1890 “Scottish and Irish firms like McVitie & Price, Macfarlane Lang and Jacob’s of Dublin . . . impinge upon the English market.”
A note on the terminology of the biscuit — long an example of two nations separated by a common ocean and a common language
In the United States the sweet biscuit is called a cookie, and the word biscuit refers either to (a) a non-sweet breadstuff often called a cracker that is commonly eaten with cheese and savory food, or (b) (particularly in Southern cooking) a bread made with baking powder often eaten when dipped in gravy. Wikipedia has a good article on biscuits.
Related material
- The biscuit — from a sailor’s dry bread to delicate pastry at tea
- The invention of canning and its effect on what Victorians ate
References
Spencer, Colin. British Food: an Extraordinary Thousand Years of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
Last modified 16 September 2015