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,
Finnish bread traditional in Finland, and it makes the best of the humidity preserving qualities of traditional rye bread by serving each piece of bread as a pre-cut pair of two halves, which protect each other but can still be easily separated. The brand is not without competitors. Two of them are Fazer's "Ruispuikulat" (a newer competitor), which are oblong in shape instead, and Oululainen's "Reissumies" (preceding Vaasa's formulation by about a decade), which are round. Both competitors are distinctly more traditional in formulation than Ruispala, mainly changing the size and shape of the traditional rye bread. As rye bread is the