an edible cracker with just one side. mathematically impossible and yet here I am monching on it.
‘scuit’ comes from the french word for ‘bake’, ‘cuire’ as bastardized by adoption by the brittish and a few hundred years
‘biscuit’ meant ‘twice-baked’, originally meaning items like hardtack which were double baked to dry them as a preservative measure long before things like sugar and butter were introduced. if you see a historical doccument use the word ‘biscuit’ do not be fooled to think ‘being a pirate mustve been pretty cool, they ate nothing but cookies’ – they were made of misery to last long enough to be used in museum displays or as paving stones
‘triscuit’ is toasted after the normal biscuit process, thrice baked
thus the monoscuit is a cookie thats soft and chewy because it was only baked once, not twice
behold the monoscuit/scuit
Why is this called a biscuit:
when brittish colonists settled in the americas they no longer had to preserve biscuits for storage or sea voyages so instead baked them once and left them soft, often with buttermilk or whey to convert cheap staples/byproducts into filling items to bulk out the meal to make a small amount of greasy meat feed a whole family. considering hardtack biscuits were typically eaten by dipping them in grease or gravy untill they became soft enough to eat without breaking a tooth this was a pretty short leap of ‘just dont make them rock hard if im not baking for the army’ but didnt drop the name because its been used for centuries and people forgot its french for ‘twice baked’ back in the tudor era, biscuit was just a lump of cooked dough that wasnt leavened bread as far as they cared
thus the buttermilk biscuit and the hardtack biscuit existed at the same time. ‘cookies’ then came to america via german and dutch immigrants as tiny cakes made with butter, sugar/molasses, and eggs before ‘tea biscuits’ as england knew them due to the new availability of cheap sugar- which is why ‘biscuit’ and ‘cookie’ are separate items in america but the same item in the UK
the evolution of the biscuit has forks on its family tree
I love it when a shitpost turns into an actually interesting post.
So (according to the concept art book) as the Fellowship travels deeper into Middle Earth, the places they pass through become inspired by progressively older periods of history. The farther along you are in the story, the more ancient the design influences
We begin in The Shire: which feels so familiar because, with its tea-kettles and cozy fireplaces, it’s inspired by the relatively recent era of rural England in the 1800s
But when we leave Hobbiton, we also leave that familiar 1800s-England aesthetic behind and start going farther back in time.
Bree is based on late 1600s English architecture
Rohan is even farther back, based on old anglo-saxon era architecture (400s-700s? ce)
Gondor is way back, and no longer the familiar English or Anglo-Saxon: its design comes from classical Greek and Roman architecture
And far far FAR back is Mordor. It’s a land of tents and huts: prehistoric, primitive, primeval. Cavemen times
And the heart of Mordor is a barren lifeless hellscape of volcanic rock…like a relic from the ages when the world was still being formed, and life didn’t yet exist
And then they finally reach Mount Doom, which one artist described as
“where the ring was made, which represents, in a sense, the moment of creation itself”
