A person’s choice of biscuit can say a lot about character. Pass me another Jammie Dodger…
I associate the 1920s very strongly with cocktails: sidecar in hand, I hear the distant buzz of jazz trumpets and think myself very glam and slim-waisted, even if I’m only in my kitchen, listening to the Bee Gees in jeans and sneakers. But I also know now that those years involved a more homely kind of hedonism, for it was only then, I’ve learned, that the biscuit truly embarked on its wholesale seduction of the middle classes, manufacturers launching “cocktail” ranges (delicate cheese wafers and celery “sticklets”) to be served at parties, and hostesses everywhere ensuring that their guest bedrooms were always furnished with quilted boxes containing Maries or Rich Teas. It was also between the wars that the chocolate biscuit made its first appearance: Peek Freans’ Creola, later known as the Bourbon.
All this, and a ton more, I found out by reading Lizzie Collingham’s delightful The Biscuit: the History of a Very British Indulgence, a book that pretty much does what it says on the (tartan, greaseproof paper-lined) tin. As she reveals, what started out as a long-lasting foodstuff for soldiers, sailors and explorers eventually became – thanks in part to the confectioners of the Islamic world, who added sugar – a sweet indulgence, the rise of which was powered by empire and mass production. The British love biscuits more than any other nation – we spend £8m on them every day in the UK, a figure that seems to me to be both entirely predictable and a little preposterous – and how eloquently they speak of us, in good ways and bad. A person’s choice of biscuit, when they eat it, and with whom, can be just as telling as anything else about them. The hierarchy of biscuits rivals anything you might see in the new series of The Crown, which also features viscounts – albeit not of the foil-wrapped, mint variety.
Biscuits speak of happier times: coming home from school and raiding the cupboard; Granny visiting with her home baking
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