BISCUIT, a kind of bread usually made in the form of flat cakes, and pierced with holes, to insure the complete evaporation of mois ture in the baking, which is necessary for pre serving it during long voyages. Biscuits are used on land as a kind of luxury, but at sea they are an article of the first necessity, since bread, in the more ordinary form in which it is used on shore, would speedily become mouldy and unfit for food. The name biscuit (twice-baked), is evidently derived from the nature of the processes to which this kind of bread was formerly subjected. The two bakings then used are no longer found necessary ; but the name, although thus rendered inappro priate, has been continued. The same name is applied, inappropriately also, to several articles made by confectioners, such as sponge biscuits, Naples biscuits, &c., which are sweetened with sugar, and are not reduced by baking to the state of dryness which is a necessary quality of biscuits in their ordi nary form. Biscuits for use as ship-bread are usually made of the meal of wheat from which only the coarsest bran has been separated. The process of mixing, kneading, stamping, and baking by hand were brought to an almost machine-like degree of rapidity and regularity in the great biscuit-manufactories established by government for supplying the British navy ; but of late years they have been still further perfected and facilitated by the introduction of machinery, by which the dough is thoroughly mixed and rolled out into sheets about two yards long and one wide, which are stamped at one stroke, into about sixty hexagonal biscuits of about six to the pound, in such a manner as to leave the sheet sufficiently coherent to be put into the oven as one piece, though when baked the biscuits are easily separated.
The hexagonal shape has been substituted for the circular, because it effects a saving of time and material, and also of space in packing.
At the ship biscuit bakery of Mr. Harrison, at Liverpool, an apparatus has been con structed which exceeds in automatic complete ness even that employed at the government establishments ; for the made biscuits travel into the oven without the aid of any peel or other hand-worked tool. The flour and water are placed in a cylinder, mixed well together by revolving bars, kneaded by a large iron cy linder, and spread like a large sheet on an endless cloth. As this cloth travels along, a nicely adjusted piece of mechanism cuts the dough into the shape of six-sided biscuits, and stamps them. Passing along the endless cloth, the biscuits are received by a kind of gridiron and enter the oven. This oven is 26 feet long; it is heated by hot water, and bakes the biscuits as they slowly travel through it. The mechanism was patented by Mr. Harri son in 1819.