Popeyes' Biscuits
Musings on the meaning of "biscuit."
Last Saturday, the fast food chain Popeyes opened its first location in the UK. Hundreds of customers waited for hours to taste the restaurant’s signature chicken and famous buttermilk biscuits.
But, these biscuits –– Popeyes’ claim to fame –– created a cultural conundrum across the pond.
“It looks like a scone, but it doesn’t taste like one,” a customer told The New York Times after trying a buttermilk biscuit. Tom Crowley, CEO of Popeyes UK, told the Times that it was clear from focus groups that British customers were confused by the concept of “buttermilk biscuits.”
In the UK, biscuits are cookies (shortbread, chocolate digestives, etc.). In the US, biscuits are small fluffy quick breads. Thus, Popeyes faced a terminology dilemma: The US biscuits served at the restaurant aren’t what British consumers know as biscuits. Crowley told the Times that British focus group participants would ask: “‘Why are you giving me a scone with chicken? I have no idea what you are doing.’”
The source of this culinary confusion stems from the early days of America.
The word biscuit means “twice-cooked,” coming from two Latin roots: bis (twice) + coctus (cook). This double-baking led to hard, flat, crisp breads that could either be sweet (like shortbread) or savory (like hardtack). The soft Southern biscuits we know today weren’t a thing yet, and the idea of hard, crisp biscuits was codified in 18th century dictionaries. For instance Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) defines biscuit specifically as “a kind of hard dry bread,” and Nathan Bailey’s New Universal English Dictionary (1776) defines bisquet –– using the French-inspired spelling –– as “a sort of hard baked-brad or cake.”
This definition of a biscuit as a “hard dry bread” held up on both sides of the Atlantic in the 18th century. In his 1791 autobiography, Benjamin Franklin wrote:
I went immediately to the baker's he directed me to, in Second-street, and ask'd for bisket, intending such as we had in Boston; but they, it seems, were not made in Philadelphia. Then I asked for a three-penny loaf, and was told they had none such. So not considering or knowing the difference of money, and the greater cheapness nor the names of his bread, I bade him give me three-penny worth of any sort. He gave me, accordingly, three great puffy rolls.
Franklin illustrates how his idea of a bisket was unleavened (not fluffy). Franklin’s biscuit was, in other words, what we understand today as a crunchy UK biscuit.
The divergence in terminology was only beginning to arise in America’s early days. During Franklin’s time, the word cookie was gaining prominence as a descriptor of sweetened hard breads in America. The word stems from Dutch influences in early American history. In 1625, the Dutch colonial settlement of New Amsterdam was established on the southern tip of Manhattan Island. The Dutch called small, sweet wheat-based treats koekjes, meaning “little cakes.” Even once New Amsterdam was taken over by the English in 1674 and renamed New York (in honor of the Duke of York), the name koekjes persisted. Slowly, as English pervaded the former-Dutch outpost, words were anglicized –– including koekjes, which became cockies and later cookies. The term cookie soon became the common American descriptor of a sweet biscuit.
Thus, cookie is American in origin, arising from a particular intermixing of the Dutch and English languages on this side of the Atlantic. This linguistic melting pot explains why cookie is only used in America and the older term biscuit persists in the rest of the English-speaking world.
Because cookie means “little cakes,” the term didn’t apply to everything that was broadly construed under the historic term biscuit. As aerating and leavening agents became more common (e.g., beaten egg in the 17th century; baking soda in the 19th century), the idea of a biscuit broadened beyond hard breads –– the term came to also describe some fluffier baked goods. The Southern buttermilk biscuit fell under this broader umbrella. While the specific origin story of the buttermilk biscuit is hard to pin down, the dish likely originated as a “beaten biscuit,” where dough would be folded over and then pounded with a wooden mallet. This folding-then-pounding process would continue for thirty minutes to add tiny air pockets to the dough; when the dough was baked, the air pockets would expand and create something slightly fluffy.
Thus, in the United States, the old term biscuit came to describe only one of its newest members, the leavened Southern quick bread, while the “traditional biscuits” (the hard, crunchy breads) fell under new terms like cookies. In other words, in America, we’ve fragmented the idea of a biscuit into many subcategories from cookies to hardtack to crackers to buttermilk biscuits.
In turn, when the American buttermilk biscuit returned to the term’s British birthplace via a 21st century fast food restaurant, diners were confused. Because the British consumer used the traditional definition of biscuit, whereas the American consumer used a newer, more limited definition.
Perhaps, though, it’s this cultural confusion that led to an hours-long line outside of that Popeyes. Because who wouldn’t want to see what those crazy Americans call a “biscuit”?
Notes:
The NYT article on Popeyes is here.
Alan Davidson’s Oxford Companion to Food includes an extensive entry on biscuits, along with insightful entries on different types of biscuits, cookies, and crackers. The book is a source of wisdom on any food topic.
This article provides a nice look at the history of the word “cookies.”
All the dictionary definitions in this post are pulled from this English Language and Usage comments thread on the meaning of “biscuit.” The Merriam-Webster definition, while not cited above, was also helpful.
Both Wikipedia articles on biscuits –– cookies and bread –– provided helpful background.