Dave Wilton did a Big List post that starts:
One distinction between the British and North American lexicons is the usage of biscuit and cookie. What North Americans call a cookie, the British call a biscuit. And what Americans call a biscuit has no exact counterpart in British cuisine. American biscuits are savory and resemble a scone in some respects, but a scone is denser and less salty.
Nothing new there (and he goes on to etymology), but Syntinen Laulu left a comment on the companion discussion post that provided many details new to me, and I thought I’d pass it along:
It’s not quite that simple. For one thing, the British term biscuit encompasses savoury biscuits, sometimes called ‘cheese biscuits’ (which means biscuits for cheese, not cheese-flavoured). Many such biscuits are also known as crackers, as in the USA; but not all the types of biscuit eaten with cheese are of a crackery type.
For another thing, for nearly two centuries the English sweet biscuit has been overwhelmingly a shop-bought item. (I say ‘English’ advisedly, because many Scottish housewives continued to bake their own shortbread long after it became available in shops.) In my 1960s urban childhood it was normal to bake cakes both family-size and individual (e.g. scones, fairy cakes) at home, but home-baked biscuits were unusual. Since the 1830s the biscuit-baking industry had been popularising and standardising a wide range of sweet biscuits, all of them of dense dough baked hard so that they maintained a clean-cut symmetrical shape, stayed good for months if not years, and could survive being exported in tins to the far corners of the Empire without being reduced to crumbs. And although some were and are made in simple shapes and left quite plain, many types have elaborate shapes, are decorated, and/or include currants or jam, or are covered with icing (that’s frosting to Leftpondians) or chocolate, or are paired into ‘sandwiches’ with a flavoured filling.
But in the last couple of decades the British food industry has embraced the principle of the American cookie – made of cake-dough, baked long and slow to remain just a bit chewy, and more ‘home-made-looking’ – and marketed them by that name. These have become popular in the UK, and cookies are accepted by British people as a specific subcategory of the genus biscuit. So a British child asked ‘What are your favourite biscuits?’ might well say ‘Choc chip cookies!’ and a British host proffering a plate of only cookie-type biscuits might say either ‘Have a cookie’ or ‘Have a biscuit’. But if it were a plate of British-style biscuits, saying ‘Have a cookie’ would be clearly nonsensical: and if it were a mixture of both British and cookie-type biscuits, the offer ‘have a cookie’ would imply that the Garibaldis, Jammy Dodgers and Petticoat Tails on the plate weren’t meant for you.
NB also that in Scotland the word cookie traditionally meant a small soft slightly sweetened bun, intended to be split and filled with whipped cream (thus occupying much the same tea-time-treat space as the English scone). Whether this usage has survived the introduction of soft-biscuit cookies, I don’t know.
I’ll be interested to see what further knowledge Hatters provide.
Setting the and-gravy type aside, to me Petit-Beurre is the archetypal biscuit: dry, flat, and rectangular. It is not a cookie. An oreo cookie is not a biscuit. A pop-tart is neither.
From Syntinen Laulu’s comment: But in the last couple of decades the British food industry has embraced the principle of the American cookie – made of cake-dough, baked long and slow to remain just a bit chewy, and more ‘home-made-looking’ – and marketed them by that name.
American cookies are somewhat varied, e.g., chocolate-covered graham crackers, seven-layer cookies, though not as varied as what I’ve read about British biscuits.
The way I remember it (haven’t had homemade cookies for a long time), homemade chocolate-chip cookies are crisp when they cool, and I’m sure they can be mailed in tins all over the country. The chewier ones were invented in the… early ’80s? Matt’s Cookies, which apparently still exists, says it started in 1979. I don’t know whether the art of making “soft-batch cookies” has reached home bakers.
I have made biscuits other than shortbread, although not recently. Perkins mostly, I think.* My grandma used to make empire biscuits, but I suppose that’s just shortbread stuck together.
I see the point, though – I definitely make cake more, and encounter other people’s homemade cakes more.
*When I was fairly small my mum made a batch of perkins which didn’t work very well, and said they were disasters. When she made a better batch she must have said something about this lot working properly, because I asked if I could please have a ‘proper disaster’, and they were called that for quite a while!
ETA: I have heard – probably read – of the other kind of cookie, but I don’t think I’ve ever come across the thing or the word in the wild. The place of scones is generally filled by scones, although more likely buttered than with cream.
(I see there are recipes on line for soft chocolate-chip cookies. Also, Google ngram search corroborates my suspicion that my hyphen in “chocolate-chip cookie” is pedantry, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop using it.)
At Separated by a Common Language, cookie was the 2007 US-to-UK word of the year. Lynne Murphy said pretty much what Syntinen said:
(With a picture showing the wider variety included in American cookies compared to British ones.) One of the comments said that French had also borrowed the word cookie, but specifically for chocolate-chip* cookies only; French Wikipedia agrees with that.
*Jerry: solidarity
Quoted from Syntinen Laulu: “In my 1960s urban childhood it was normal to bake cakes both family-size and individual (e.g. scones, fairy cakes) at home…”
I think Syntinen is using cake in the British sense there, which is more inclusive than the American sense. Lynne Murphy has written about that as well (2021):
And in AmE (as far as I know), cakes are generally not individual-sized, scones are not cakes, and fairy cakes don’t exist — at least, I’ve never seen anything here by that name. The OED (2013 revision) neglected to label fairy cake as British; I think that was an oversight, considering that every other dictionary I checked (including the Oxford Dictionary of English, 2010) that has it labels it British.
The Onion made an attempt to celebrate the 4th of July. I wouldn’t call it a success, but they went for the cookie/biscuit split as the first reason for the American revolution.
The OED (2013 revision) neglected to label fairy cake as British; I think that was an oversight, considering that every other dictionary I checked (including the Oxford Dictionary of English, 2010) that has it labels it British.
I, an American, have no idea what it is and don’t remember ever running into the term.
It’s a cupcake, maybe smaller than modern American oversized cupcakes. I’ve only seen it in books set in Britain.
One of the comments said that French had also borrowed the word cookie, but specifically for chocolate-chip* cookies only; French Wikipedia agrees with that.
“Cookie” was also borrowed into the Spanglish I used growing up in California, borrowed as cuqui and used interchangeably with galleta. “Cake” was also borrowed as quequi and used interchangeably with pastel.
I (estadounidense, most of my life living outside the US after age 18) would never call a graham cracker a “cookie.” To me it’s type of cracker. Shortbread is shortbread, brownies are brownies (although they may be moist and denser or more “cakey), scones are scones. I don’t think I’d heard of perkins before, but looking them up (they look good) they seem to be similar to the oatmeal cookies I make. I may call my oatmeal cookies “proper disasters” when they turn out well next time. I think the biscuit/cookie split is more like a biscuit/cookie/cracker split. Just call them all 餅乾 bing3gan.
Oops, small detail: after age 20. Plenty of time growing up in California for a biscuit/cookie/cracker typology to have become fossilized for me.
BrE flapjack (US ‘flapjack’ = pancake) is a staple of trampers (hikers/ramblers) throughout the BrE-speaking world. They can be crammed into pockets/backpacks without reducing to crumbs; and last for years as emergency rations. I used to bake my own, but there are plenty of acceptable commercial ones these days — especially ‘home made style’ at farmers’ markets.
BrE parkin consistency midway between cake and biscuit. (I thought there was a thread already, but Gshit has lost it.)
BrE gingernut = US ginger snap come under BrE ‘biscuit’. Note the importance of withstanding dunking in tea. (Related to gingerbread man, but those are softer; disintegrate upon dunking.)
Wikipedia tells me ‘In British English, bar cookies are known as “tray bakes”.’ I think of “tray bake” as a marketing neologism; OED says 1980. My mother’s “oatmeal cookies” resembled what are now sold as “oatmeal flapjacks”; I believe US “flapjacks” are different. [ETA: AntC ninjaed] Perhaps UK/Irl oatmeal flapjacks are in US a type of cookie.
Some people draw a distinction between “ginger nut” and “ginger snap”, I surmise based on the US and UK having slightly different central prototypes within the same semantic range. (cf. “grey” v “gray”?)
The most famous biscuit definition controversy in the UK was over Jaffa cakes in 1991. The packets are found in the biscuit aisle rather than the cake aisle of the supermarket,* but they are classed as cakes for tax purposes. “Cookie” did not enter the discussion. Would they count as cookies in the US?
*often sections of the same aisle. Freshly baked cakes and cookies are in the separate bakery section.
“icing (that’s frosting to Leftpondians)”
To me (born and raised in California, last thirty years in Pennsylvania and Maryland) the two are synonymous, with no transatlantic overtones. I personally am far more likely to use “frosting,” but encountering “icing” is unremarkable, and carries no taint of Britishness.
Andre Agassi’s 1990 hair coloration was described as “frosting” in US and “highlights” in UK. I don’t know if similar applies now. Not to Agassi, who has embraced baldness. Times change, people change, hairstyles change.
A fairy cake is similar to a queen cake but different from a fruit bun.
We may have covered this here before; German Keks is a loan from English cake(s), but designates biscuits / cookies.
German Biskuit is specifically “sponge cake”.
I ‘ve heard bickie being used in British TV shows – is that just a colloquial form of “biscuit” or is it a category of its own?
That’s what the Collins English Dictionary says. It also lists big bickies as Australian slang for lots of money.
Hmm, I (US) always thought the distinction between frosting and icing was texture: icing cracks and crumbles while frosting smears. Did I somehow make this up?
US flapjack is supposed to be a synonym for pancake (which I’ve never actually encountered in the wild, except as a name for pets). Another synonym is hotcake, which I’ve only encountered from a Mexican friend, apparently this is what they’re called in Mexican Spanish.
Also yes, Jaffa cakes are definitely cookies. I’ve never met a UK flapjack but they seem to be granola bars.
In Russian, бисквит biskvit means sponge cake, as in German, and кекс keks refers to a doughy, unlayered cake like a pound cake or a cupcake. I’m not confident as to whether banana bread would count as a кекс, but it’s not as broad as German Kuchen; an Apfelkuchen would typically be called a пирог in Russian.
Growing up in the US, I took печенье to be an exact translation of cookie but maybe others will disabuse me of this notion.
And there is this, just published by the Onion https://www.youtube.com/shorts/BvFOycmfErg
So if an English songwriter (from Swindon) comes out with the lyric “And all the world is biscuit-shaped / It’s just for me to feed my face,” what shape is meant? It may be relevant that the world (presumably the same one) is said earlier in the song to be “football-shaped,” where “football” is likely the local dialect word for “soccer ball,” but what shape is “biscuit-shaped” without that contextual clue?
I may have jumped to a conclusion about soft British cookies. The ones in the link provided by ktschwarz (that’s two of us! it’s a movement!) look very caky. Few if any American cookies are like that. Fig newtons might have a similar texture, but the shape is quite different.
@CrawdadTom: I agree that a graham cracker is a cracker, not a cookie, but chocolate-covered grahams are called cookies and sold in the cookie aisle. I’m getting the impression that the chocolate-covered grahams of my youth were made by Nabisco and don’t exist any more.
@F and Hans: Are you talking about an American sponge cake (no fat, beaten egg whites, little or no leavening, which means it can be made kosher for Passover), or a British sponge cake (seems to be a very broad category)?
@Richard Hershberger: Same on icing and frosting. I think maybe some people make a distinction involving eggs.
@Everybody: Is there a language where a word coming from Latin bis and coctus, without calquing, now means something that’s baked twice?
If we’re doing edge cases, do coconut macaroons, ridiculously expensive macarons, and meringues count as cookies? As biscuits?
Judging from Wikipedia’s description, I think American courts might have trouble classifying Jaffa cakes, if they had to for some reason.
@Jerry Friedman: Thanks, I have no memory of what aisle chocolate-covered grahams are in, if I ever knew, but I would still consider them crackers. Covering crackers in chocolate does not make them cookies. Even if they’re called cookies on the package.
Can you still get fig newtons?
Icing and frosting are the same thing to me, too.
Is there a language where a word coming from Latin bis and coctus, without calquing, now means something that’s baked twice?
I don’t know, but you can see all the descendants of biscoctus here.
Can you still get fig newtons?
Yes. They still taste the same!
@Hat: all the descendants of biscoctus
Thanks. Looks as if the Dutch and Catalan versions can still mean rusks (like Melba toast, which according to Wikipedia is actually cooked three times).
My memory is that the first things called cookies in the UK were ‘Maryland Cookies’, which appeared in the 1960s. They were small, round, hard, slightly domed, brown, rough-surfaced and contained chocolate chips.
Similar biscuits began to be called cookies, so long as they were hard and round and included chocolate chips or other bits such as raisins or candied peel.
Over time the usage evolved so that softer things, which can’t be called biscuits, were included. They grew, some reaching the size of a small plate.
Near me there is an indoor market with a stall called Tom’s Cookies. A dozen different varieties are offered, all are large, round, soft, flat, rough-surfaced, and have different things added to the dough. Supermarkets offer packets of similar cookies, but much smaller.
I thought “fig newton” was just the US name for what is called a “fig roll” in Ireland, but now I learn it is in fact a Nabisco* trademark. The US generic term might be “fig cake” or “fig bar”. Probably Nabisco’s market share is very large.
*not Nacooco?!
@F: You didn’t make it up. Lynne Murphy has done icing and frosting too, and her distinction sounds like yours: her AmE frosting is made of mostly fat (shortening or butter) and sugar and is thick and fluffy, while her icing is based on milk or water and sugar and is hard and smooth. The buttery kind would be spread on the cake with a knife or spatula, the non-buttery kind would be drizzled or dripped or brushed on. However, the first comment pointed out that “some AmE dialects use one word or the other, and either don’t distinguish, or call the one I call ‘icing’ ‘glaze’.” Lynne then acknowledged that there was regional variation.
I think I’m with Richard and Tom: both the buttery and non-buttery kinds could be called either icing or frosting.
The DARE survey in the 1960s included “The sweet covering spread on top of a cake”, with an icing vs. frosting distribution visible on the map; this is probably the source for AHD’s regional note at frosting:
I wondered if that distribution had been homogenized away by now, but the 2003 Harvard Dialect Survey still showed a definite icing region and frosting region, as well as a lot who said “both” or “they’re not the same, icing is thinner”.
In a startling display of unpatriotic kowtowing to foreign princes, some things that are normally called cookies or crackers in the U.S. are called “biscuits” on the box. (Some shredded wheat, even.) Nothing in this comment should be construed as invalidating my argument that chocolate-covered grahams are cookies because the box says “cookies”. <*is large, contains multitudes*>
Yes, the generic term for fig newtons in the U.S. is “fig bars”.
@Jon: Your description of Maryland cookies sounds just like American chocolate-chip cookies, and the pictures look just like.
> “fig cake” or “fig bar”
They’re fig bars in part because bars are healthy while cake is sugary. This is absolutely true from a parental shopping perspective, though perhaps less true from a point of view that also contemplates ingredients and cooking methods.
Biscotti are baked twice. You shape the dough into a loaf and bake it, or half-bake it, and then you cut it into slices, lay them out flat, and bake them again.
“Frosting” was a word we heard on TV in my NYC childhood. We had only icing.
@CuConnacht: Thanks, I didn’t know that about biscotti.
@ktschwarz: Thanks for the icing-frosting comments. I do call that sugar-with-milk-or-water-or-lemon-juice stuff “glaze”. We seem to be stuck on frozen-water imagery.
Here’s “royal icing” with egg whites, in case you want to make your cookies look professionally decorated.
Are you talking about an American sponge cake (no fat, beaten egg whites, little or no leavening, which means it can be made kosher for Passover), or a British sponge cake (seems to be a very broad category)?
Can you separated-by-a-language people please agree on word meanings, so that I can look up a word in a dictionary and both sides of the pond understand what I mean? The German Biskuit dough seems to be similar to the American version. What complicates the picture is that Biskuit is also used to designate what my dictionary calls “ladyfingers” (which probably is a flower in American, a kitchen implement in British, a bottle opener in Australian English, and a kind of cookie only in some obscure corner of Scotland.)
“ladyfingers”
In BrE means okra. US ‘ladyfingers’ are BrE ‘sponge fingers’, whereas ‘chocolate fingers’ are biscuit with chocolate covering. (Never been called ‘Cadbury fingers’ in my hearing: we must have had the cheap knock-offs.)
(seems to be wanting to have their cake and …) In BrE they’re *cake*, not biscuit. Used in making Tiramisu, as wp says — “sponge element” n.b..
the American cookie – made of cake-dough, baked long and slow to remain just a bit chewy
just to go back to the original post: to my understanding and experience, every part of this definition is inaccurate.
USeng “cookies” can be made of almost any kind of dough, and some mixtures that i wouldn’t call dough at all – meringue, for instance, as an outlier, but quite near the definitional center, oatmeal cookies often are almost entirely oats & raisins, with just enough sticky stuff to hold them together (and i’ve met some “raw” versions with no flour involved). but cake dough is perhaps uniquely unlikely to be found in a cookie – in part because if a baked good is in that textural range, it’ll almost always be called a brownie, a cupcake, a bar, or (on packaging; not in my experience as a vernacular category) a “snack cake”.
and, for comprehensibility taking the “long and slow” to mean long and low, most of the cookie recipies i know do not meet that bill at all. i just did some quick cross-checking in the “cookies” tag at Smitten Kitchen*, and it bears out my experience: i didn’t see a cooking time over 17 minutes or a baking temperature under 325ºF.
finally, the appropriate chewiness of a cookie depends above all on the kind of cookie. a shortbread cookie should be solid but crumbly; a black-and-white should be soft and somewhere between bready and cakey, with thick crisp frosting**; to me (others may disagree), a gingersnap should be thin and crisp but not crumbly; oatmeal raisin cookies range from extremely chewy to what i can only describe as organic breccia; and what in my blood family we call “bubbie cookies” should be on the crisp side when they’re fresh from the oven, but when at their best 5-10 days later will be softer and crumblier.
and, of course, the arguments of chocolate chip cookie eaters are endless! and best resolved (to my eye) by subcategorization. chewy chocolate chip cookies are mainly/originally a commercial-production phenomenon in my eyes, and not my favorite or paradigmatic version; i’ve enjoyed thick and bready ones (especially when over 50% chocolate); but my favorites are thin and on the dense side, getting crisper over the day-at-most that they last after coming out of the oven.
i don’t think it’s possible to define the category beyond the most general characteristics (and even those will have exceptions): sweet, small, baked, and usually round or round-ish.
.
* a good solid recipe blogger of the old school (who i’m about 1.5 social steps removed from), who’s a good window into these questions of categorization because her overall approach is a kind of populist epicurianism, and her tagging is to my eye entirely about what she thinks people may search for to find a given recipe. so she includes fig newtons, macaroons, and hamantashen in the category of cookie, which i support, but also rugelakh (no), graham crackers (what? why?), and ice cream sandwiches (arguably made of cookies but not themselves cookies).
** apparently i’m a new englander in this. you ice a cake, but what’s on top of a cake is frosting.
every part of this definition is inaccurate.
I might correct “cookie-dough” to “cookie batter”.
What happened is clear (meaning I have a theory). The British borrowed American chocolate-chip cookies but, being outside the North American Kochbund, British bakers evolved them through lenition and lengthening in all dimensions, while in America, changes were slower—an industrial variant with a different kind of lenition arose, and some forms show pecan sandhi.
I agree that British cookies look as if Hostess, Little Debbie, or—who perpetrates Krimpets?—Tastykake could synthesize plastic-wrapped versions and sell them as “snack cakes”.
My strongest memory of the term “fairy cake” (when I was otherwise unfamiliar with the phrase) comes from the Total Perspective Vortex (H2G2, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe):
(boldface mine)
Although now I look at it, the phrasing seems odd to me. When I was first imagining it, “small piece” evoked a thin slice of a typical round cake.
Does “a piece of fairy cake” mean just one fairy cake (cupcake)? Or does it actually mean that the already small fairy cake has been sliced into tiny pieces (fourths? eighths?), and just one of those was taken?
Having seen mandelbrot being baked, I now realize that it’s more or less the same thing as almond biscotti.
Are there any English biscuits that are made the same way, that is, baked in a long loaf which is cut into slices which are then baked again?
ಠ_ಠ
rozele: I think it’s clear the author of the comment is defining the American cookie that has gained a place in the British vocabulary. Of course American “cookie” would encompass things like shortbread. But the Brits aren’t going to call those cookies when they already have shortbread biscuits. The reason the word cookie is used for things like chocolate chip cookies is because that style of treat has previously been uncommon there, and thus in need of a word (the chocolate chip cookie was invented in Massachusetts, and they are often made to appear rough and homemade even when they are clearly manufactured, a very different vibe from the painfully prim British biscuit, with its corners as stiff as D’arcy’s collar). It’s the same reason why the English language has adopted the Inuit word for structure, “igloo,” but only for the kind of Inuit structure that doesn’t already have a name in English.