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 Digestive03) Orange Club04) Ginger Nut05) Cocoa Rusk (Paximadakia Greek biscuit)06) Nice07) Custard Cream08) Garibaldi09) Choco Leibniz10) Fig Roll11) 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 creating something more resonant and rewarding than a metrical statement of ingredients and procedure for preparation of the 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, a work in progress, the second to follow on...Biscuits Of EmpirePinch a coconut from old pink Kandy*and desiccate the blighter. Set it aside.Hack cane sugar from your plantationor get your slaves to do so, bundle and ride the cargo like that coconut acrosshalf a world of seas to the old country.Refine it, granulate and pulverise untilsweet powder and sickly wealth seeps
cross seaport and hinterland. Set all by.Butter up some dairymaids, call on themillers of the flat wheatfields of Angliafor flours both plain and corn. The pull
of convenience is strong, soldiers awayon battle duty need sustaining stores sothe Army and Navy Co-Usable Societystocks biscuits from British factories in
airtight tins, the cutting-edge of Empirekept sweet with Nice, and it is also said the great Dominatrix, plump Victorianahas an extravagance for them, traveling 
with a pack of Huntley & Palmers finestwheresoever 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 ;-) Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to Facebook