BISCUIT, sea, is a sort of bread much dried, to make it keep for the service of the sea. It was formerly baked twice, or oftener, and prepared six months before the embarkation. It will keep good a whole year.
The process of biscuit-baking for the British navy is as follows, and it is equal ly simple and ingenious. The meal, and every other article, being supplied with much certainty and simplicity, large lumps of dough, consisting merely of flour and water, are mixed up together ; and as the quantity is so immense as to preclude, by any common process, a pos sibility of kneading it, a man manages, or, as it is termed, rides a machine, which is called a horse. This machine is a long roller, apparently about four or five inches in diameter, and about seven or eight feet in length. It has a play to a certain extension, by means of a staple in the wall, to which is inserted a kind of eye, making its action like the machine by which they cut chaff for horses. The lump of dough being placed exactly in the centre of a raised platform, the man sits upon the end of the machine, and literally rides up and down throughout its whole circular direction, till the dough is equally indented ; and this is repeated, till it is sufficiently kneaded ; at which times, by the different positions of the lines, large or small circles are described, according as they are near to or distant from the wall.
The dough in this state, is handed over to a second workman, who slices it with a prodigious knife ; and it is then in a pro• per state for the use of those bakers who attend the oven. These are five in num ber; and their different departments are as well calculated for expedition and cor rectness, as the making of pins, or other mechanical employments. On each side of a large table, where the dough is laid, stands a workman ; at a small table near the oven stands another ; a fourth stands by the side of the oven to receive the bread ; and a fifth to supply the peel. By this arrangement the oven is as regularly filled, and the whole exercise performed in as exact time, as a military evolution. The man on the further side of the large table moulds the dough, having previous. ly formed it into small pieces, till it has the appearance of muffins, although ra ther thinner, and which he does two to gether, with each hand ; and as fast as he accomplishes this task, he delivers his work over to the mall on the other side of the table, who stamps them with a docker on both sides with a mark. As he rids himself of this work, he throws the biscuits on the smaller table next the oven, where stands the third workman, whose business is merely to separate the different pieces into two, and place theist immediately under the hand of him who supplies the oven, whose work of throw ing, or rather chucking, the bread upon the peel must be so exact, that if he look ed round for a single moment, it is im possible he should perform it correctly.
The fifth receives the biscuit on the peel, and arranges it in the oven ; in which duty he is so very expert, that, though the different pieces are thrown at the rate of seventy in a minute, the peel is always disengaged in time to receive them separately.
As the oven stands open during the whole time of filling it, the biscuits first thrown in would be first baked, were there not some counteraction to such an inconvenience. The remedy lies in the ingenuity of the man who forms the pieces of dough, and who, by imperceptible de grees, proportionably diminishes their size, till the loss of that time which is taken up during the filling of the oven has no more effect to the disadvantage of one of the biscuits than to another.
So much critical exactness and neat ac tivity occur in the exercise of this labour, that it is difficult to decide, whether the palm of excellence is due to the moulder, the marker, the splitter, the chucker, or the depositor ; all of them, like the wheels of a machine, seeming to he actu ated by the same principle. The busi ness is, to deposit in the oven seventy bis cuits in a minute ; and this is accomplish ed with the regularity of a clock ; the clack of the peel, during its motion in the oven, operating like the pendulum.
The biscuits thus baked are kept in repositories, which receive warmth from being placed in drying lofts over the ovens, till they are sufficiently dry to be packed into bags, without danger of get ting mouldy ; and when in such a state, they are then packed into bags of a hun dred weight each, and removed into store houses for immediate use.
The number of bake-houses belonging to the victualling-office at Plymouth are two, each of which contains four ovens. which are heated twenty times a day, and in the course of that time bake is suffici ent quantity of bread for 16,000 men.
The granaries are large, and well con structed; when the wheat is ground, the flour is conveyed into the upper stories of the bake-houses, whence it descends, through a trunk in each, immediately in to the hands of the workman.
The bake-house belonging to the vic tualling office at Deptford consists of two divisions, and has twelve ovens, each of which bakes twenty shoots daily (Sun days excepted ;) the quantity of flour used for each shoot is two bushels, or 112 pounds, which baked produce 102 pounds of biscuit. Ten pounds are regularly al lowed on each shoot for shrinkage, &c. The allowance of biscuit in the navy is one pound for each man per day, so that one of the ovens at Deptford furnishes bread daily for 2,040 men.