Biscuit (bread) cooking, most often based on ground wheat and warmed with gravy. The biscuit emerged as a distinct food type in the early 19th century, before the American Civil War. Cooks created a cheaply produced addition for their meals that required no yeast, which was expensive and difficult to store. With no leavening agents except the bitter-tasting pearlash available, beaten biscuits were laboriously beaten and folded to incorporate air into the dough which expanded when heated in the oven causing the biscuit to rise. In eating, the advantage of the biscuit over a slice of bread was that it was harder,
Bost's Bread "The Best Taste You Ever Toasted", and "Baked Slow to Sell Fast" became bywords and embedded into the cultural slang-speak of the area where Bost's Bread was sold. In the late 1970s the Bost's Bakery was sold to Wonder Bread, which operated the Bakery for a decade, adding its staple "Wonder Bread", Twinkies, frosted cupcakes and other confections to the product line alongside the bread products. In the late 1980s the parent company of Bost's and Wonder Bread shut down the bakery, ending a tasty chapter in the history of Shelby and Cleveland County, North Carolina. Wonder Bread and Hostess