Biscuits – from the Latin biscoctus, meaning “twice-cooked”– go back at least as far as the 1500s. The first biscuits were made from three basic ingredients – flour, water and salt – and cooked until they were hard, dry and tasteless. These compact bricks of bread, which the British called hardtack, were given as rations to soldiers and sailors because they could travel the world without spoiling.

Biscuits have come a long way since then. As sugar and butter became more common in Europe, they evolved into sweet pastries like biscotti, lady fingers and Koekjes. In Great Britain, biscuit still refers to any flat, sweet, flour-based pastry. Dutch settlers introduced Koekjes to America, where they became so popular that we adopted the word “cookie.”

In the antebellum south, hardtack transformed into the more palatable “beaten biscuit.” This involved beating the dough with a rolling pin, axe handle, or other blunt instrument until it achieved the desired layered texture. The process was so laborious that it usually fell to enslaved cooks.

It wasn’t until the 1840s, when baking soda became readily available to home cooks, that leavened biscuits rose in popularity – drop biscuits, angel biscuits and buttermilk biscuits. Baking soda requires acid to instigate the leavening. Cultured buttermilk is naturally acidic and cooks often had it on hand as a byproduct of butter making.

Crispy on the outside, soft and buttery on the inside, buttermilk biscuits are in many ways similar to croissants, only much quicker and more practical to make at home. The layered texture is the result of repeated stacking and rolling, as described in the directions and accompanying video.

With the perfect biscuit as a base, the possibilities are endless; smother them with butter, honey, sausage gravy; make Strawberry Shortcake; turn them into a breakfast sandwich, or even a Southern-style Eggs Benedict.