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,
Cockle bread in which the bread is mentioned: Writing in "Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain" in 1854, John Brand describes the nursery rhyme as "modern", but adds that its connection to the earlier "moulding" of cockle bread "is by no means generally understood". Cockle bread Cockle bread was an inferior type of British corn or wheat bread mixed with "cockle weed". In the 17th century a practice known as "moulding" cockle-bread had a sexual connotation. Cockle bread is also mentioned in a 19th-century nursery rhyme. The play "The Old Wives' Tale" by George Peele, first published in 1595, has