INKY FOOL'S BISCUIT

Some friends of mine have just given me a copy of The Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth, aka, The Inky fool. And I have to say they were pretty quick off the mark (if you'll pardon the pun) given I received the book into my hot hand on 6th November to discover, only a few moments ago, that it had come out but three days earlier.

So I haven't read it yet (actually am currently reading a fascinating book about typefaces and fonts called Just My Type but that's a different story). Not that reading it, as all critics know, should be any block to making comments. So with that in mind, I will allow myself to comment on the one bit of the book I have just read - The Preface.

Mr Forsyth introduces us to his fascinating world of word derivations and the derivatives of those derivations via the humble biscuit explaining, as my English teacher explained to me at prep school, that the word arose from the French meaning 'twice cooked'.

And so it does but that derivation is not, I think, the interesting one because it causes people to nod with either real or feigned comprehension and then move on to other things.

But hold hard you dunkers of the twice-cooked. Have you ever baked cooked a biscuit? Actually, you only do it once. I've looked through recipe after recipe and have never found a double-cooked item even if we stretch a point and talk about a sort of yeast-based biscuit. After all you could hardly argue that allowing the yeast to prove is akin to cooking.

Now of course Mr Forsyth is right, my English teacher was right and so, I am glad to tell you, was clarifier of this conundrum Kate Colquhoun who, a few years ago wrote a fascinating book called Taste which is a well-researched and thoroughly readable account of the British table from the days of the Celts and Romans through to the wartime powdered egg.

Ms Colquhoun does explain - but en passant in the way of one to whom it's obvious - that twice cooking was the fate of the early biscuit.

I won't go into the detail because the point I am trying to make is broader. This is that we should not accept scholarship blindly as attractive as it is(and I count elucidating the derivations of words as 'scholarship'). After all I wonder whether Mr Forsyth knows how to make a medieval cookie?

Which reminds me of one of my younger daughter's jokes: There are two biscuits baking in an oven and one says to the other, "It's getting very hot in here." To which the second replies, "Good heavens, a talking biscuit!"