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.