Nigel Slater's Great British Biscuit

There aren't many opportunities in life when you can truly take a break

but when those moments do crop up, whether you're alone or with others,

there's one culinary companion that usually puts in an appearance.

The biscuit.

Simple, small and incredibly morish,

there's something reliable about a biscuit.

You see, they're always there.

Unless, of course, you eat the entire packet.

This is my story of the British biscuit.

I'll be exploring its earliest origins.

This is the Victory.

Meeting biscuit aficionados.

So this is the bit when I start to look a bit like a crazy biscuit guy.

And putting biscuits under considerable scientific pressure.

That is a dunking disaster.

This is a journey charting the origins

of a long and faded trail of biscuit crumbs.

After all, I'm not alone in my passion for this simple baked item.

There are 71 million packets of digestive biscuits sold every year.

That's 52 biscuits eaten every second.

That means 184,000 digestive biscuits will be eaten

by the end of this programme.

Biscuits pop up everywhere in our day to day lives.

They're not as brash or as demanding as sweets.

Instead, they work their magic by stealth.

-Please tell me you've got some biscuits.

-Yep.

They sidle up alongside you when you least expect it.

-One of those. There you are, sir.

-Thank you very much.

-Thank you.

-Have a good day.

I love a biscuit. I can't imagine life without them.

They're a treat, they're a little bit of sustenance,

but more than that they signify a break in my day.

It might be a working day, I might be doing something in the garden,

I might be at my desk or I might be on a train going somewhere.

It's just a moment to stop and take stock.

I have my favourites - always have done ever since I was a kid.

Sometimes they're for sharing

and other times they're all just for yourself.

I love the way they break and they crumble

and the crumbs stick to your fingers.

But I've often wondered who decided

that this would be the perfect stop in the day?

The first trail of broken biscuits are taking me out to sea

or rather to the dry docks of Portsmouth.

A major part of the modern biscuit's genetic past

has a distinctly nautical flavour.

I've got the Marine Dictionary here and I've found biscuit.

"A sea biscuit is a sort of bread much dried to make it keep

"for the use of the navy and is good for a whole year."

And a biscuit to me is about fun, it's a joy to eat,

but here it's had a much more significant role -

it was absolutely crucial to the crew's life.

In the late 18th century Admiral Nelson was just one

of the many naval officers for whom the biscuit was a secret weapon

in his control of the high seas.

Nigel, good to meet you. Welcome to Victory.

It's an awesome, awesome place to be.

This is where Nelson commanded Victory and the fleet from at the Battle of Trafalgar.

That is his little plaque, isn't it?

And that is the spot where Nelson fell, yes.

I know a little bit of the story and quite a bit of the history of it

but I'm here for something that might seem insignificant,

but it's not to me.

-You've got biscuits on board, haven't you?

-We've got lots of biscuits on board, yes.

As far back as Ancient Egypt,

sailors have survived on very basic, hard-baked items.

The word biscuit derives from two Latin words

bis, meaning twice and coquere, which means to cook.

Over the years the word has evolved from bisquite through to biscuit,

in other words, meaning twice baked.

The smell of this place is extraordinary.

How many people would be down here?

In terms of meal times, you'd be over 600 people,

so it's very, very cramped.

Life is hard at the time,

so for the men on board, you have a roof over your head,

you've got a very good diet by the standards of the day

and it's not all rum, sodomy and the lash.

Well, I'm happy to hear that.

And these are our ship's biscuits.

We carry about 700,000 when we first put to sea.

18-21 men would each be getting a pound,

so about five of those a day every day.

35,000 calories a week these chaps get.

About 14,000 of those calories come from those biscuits.

So isn't it also referred to as hard tack?

Absolutely. Hard tack is ship's biscuits.

-They are hard.

-They are hard. HAMMERING

-So you have a couple of options for eating something like this.

-Yeah.

First thing you can do - it's the original dunker.

You can dunk it in your drink, you can dunk it in the stew you have.

Or you can wrap it in a piece of cloth

and basically bash it with something heavy, probably a cannonball,

and the bit that will be eaten last is the stamped area,

because that's the most compressed, that's the hardest.

-What's that about?

-It's the crow's foot or the broad arrow

and it basically denotes that it's government property.

That mark of sort of ownership and authenticity, I suppose,

I mean, to this day that appears on almost every biscuit we know,

so really this mark is actually, I suppose, the very beginning of a trademark.

This really is the first example of mass-produced biscuits, isn't it?

Absolutely.

Is it really an urban myth that dunking started

in order to get rid of the weevils in your biscuit?

-Weevils are very, very small. You'd never see them.

-They're tiny.

What they're seeing is something the seamen would call bargemen,

because this is a bread barge in which the biscuits are kept

and it's the larva of probably the cadelle beetle,

-something which is three quarters of an inch long...

-Ugh!

-..a nice, big, black head.

-So they flick those off and pull those out?

-Well, it depends how squeamish you are.

You pull them out, you flick them off, you bang the biscuit on the table.

We could be here all day. it's just not going to happen is it?

Let's see if this works.

-Mind the table.

-So we've got a 32-pound cannonball.

This is the Victory!

Oh, heavens! You haven't even made a dent in it.

ANDREW LAUGHS

Well, let's see if this works.

I think we might be able to break that.

Ah! You know, this is a bit like the first scone I ever baked.

My dad threw it out on the lawn for the birds

and it was there six months later.

Yes, we're in.

Mm, you would be seriously full after one of these.

I think it's going to sit on the stomach like a cannonball.

With the birth of the ship's biscuit fresh in my mind,

I'm left wondering about the first biscuit I ever tasted.

I think that my first biscuit wasn't far away

from the first biscuit of all, the rusk.

And you're supposed to dip them into milk,

just like the ship's biscuit - it's exactly the same thing - but...

being a little contrary from an early age, I ate my rusks dry.

I'd break them up. I'd always...

Oh! Always sniff them.

There's a milkiness there, a little sweetness.

It's sort of like breast milk in biscuit form.

My most abiding memories of biscuits are also tied up with travel.

OK, perhaps not as long distance as Nelson

but certainly long distance enough

for a very hungry schoolboy boarding the school bus.

All the noisy boys sat at the back, because we had transistor radios.

I used to get really cross if someone got there before me.

But I was always the first to get on at school,

because I lived farthest away, so I always got the corner seat.

There wasn't much shouting, there wasn't much playing around

but there was lots of rustling, lots of wrappers being opened,

lots of little tuck boxes with the lids coming of.

And when we got off the school bus, we'd be covered in crumbs,

mostly mine.

I'm picking up a chap who is a self-confessed biscuit expert.

Stuart Payne, also known as Nicey, has written the only user's guide to the modern biscuit.

-Hello.

-Hello, Nigel. How are you?

-Come and sit down.

There's quite possibly nothing that this man doesn't know about biccies.

-You're my biscuit anorak, aren't you?

-I am that man.

-I guess I do like them a lot.

-It's this curious thing

that people measure their lives in different ways.

I mean, for some people it's the music they were listening to

but sometimes it's what you ate.

I can remember, for instance, vividly where I was standing

and who I was with when I learnt of the existence of the chocolate HobNob.

I can... I'm with you.

I mean, my life is a trail of crumbs.

I can measure my life by what I was eating

and very often it's a biscuit.

We have a connection with these things, little baked items.

It's always, "Oh, yeah, these used to be in our picnic basket whenever we went off for a picnic,"

and it's all those associations

and probably more with biccies than anything else.

As we head down memory lane,

our first nostalgic stop is once again with what I call

the biscuits of sustenance,

the rather harsh, bland biscuits of the adult world.

-Ah-ha!

-Ah!

-Ah!

Well, what we've got here is all the kind of plain, archetypal biscuits.

In fact, these were the sort of biscuits

-that actually my mum would have loved.

-Yeah.

You know when your mum said, "Do you want a biscuit?"

and you got terribly excited and you ended up with a Rich Tea?

Exactly. Look at that - thin arrowroot.

-Oh! I haven't seen a thin arrowroot for years!

-Look at the writing.

The exciting thing about a thin arrowroot is...

-It's this font.

-It's almost like it's been laser etched on.

Like you say, Nigel, all these biscuits, they're plain, round dunkers.

As I kid, I... There we go.

I have not seen one of those for years - a Rich Tea finger.

I didn't even know they made them.

Morning Coffee.

This is the village hall biscuit.

This is the biscuit that when we go to a jumble or something like that

and they bring out a plate of biscuits,

it would be the Morning Coffee.

It does look boring but I love what's going on

-with all the detail and the coffee pot.

-And the coffee pot.

-Now, you see, that...

-Ah! There we go.

-What are you going to call that?

-Yes, well...

Because I know what I call it, I call it a "niece".

Really? Well, I would call it a "nice".

-Why?

-I think our family were just trying to be posher than they were

and we'd heard of Nice.

Well, exactly, so Nice - place in France.

-You go down there with one of these, they won't know what you've got.

-No.

The Rich Tea is one that's particularly prone to self-destruction,

something that happens when they bake them

if they don't cool them down right,

they have a tension in the biscuit that's baked into them

and they can spontaneously crack.

There's something that we've only discovered recently

using the same technique

that they used for studying the materials in fighter plane wings,

that you can shine laser beams off and can tell that.

But when it comes down to it, you have to watch out - they could go at any minute.

It's difficult not to judge people on their biscuit selection

but I always do.

I was always asking myself, why are they eating them?

Is it because they have to?

Is there some special reason, you know,

a medical reason or what have you,

they can't have anything too exciting or stimulating?

They can't have anything too stimulating.

There's a lot of bells and whistles going on in the biscuit world

and you wonder sometimes whether there is any future

for things like all these lovely little plain digestives

and yet they're still there.

-Ah, yes!

-Now we're onto the serious stuff.

The boss of all the round and brown biscuits is the digestive.

You always need to give your biscuit, especially a digestive,

a tap on the side of your biscuit tin to check for structural integrity.

It's quite a frugal smell. There's nothing extravagant about it.

It's not creamy, it's not too sweet.

This smells like my guinea pig's cage.

Yep, that's a common thing with biscuits,

-that kind of pet shop...

-Yeah. Ambience.

-I've often said that.

-Hamsters.

Wine tasters will talk of gun flint

and pet shop is a sort of phrase that you would use in biscuit tasting

to be evocative of that kind of strange, damp, wheaty smell.

When I used to go and buy straw, this is what this smells like.

I've met people who smell of digestive biscuits, you know what I mean?

Yes, I do know what you mean.

When I was a kid and the biscuit tin came out,

I dreaded getting to the bottom of it,

knowing what would be left were the plain biscuits,

the ones that your auntie ate,

the ones that had no cream, no chocolate, no fondant icing, no fun.

Sometimes they had sugar on top,

sometimes they had little bobbles like a bath mat,

but they were so boring.

They were what I call prison biscuits.

And then I think there comes a point, a sort of coming of age,

when you sort of understand the plain biscuit.

It has its own charm, it's just something that comes with age,

the idea that you can eat something as a treat that isn't ostentatious.

It probably means I'm getting on a bit.

There's no frills to any of these biscuits,

which is why my auntie always gave them frills.

She would always bring them out on a plate with a doyley.

I suppose she felt she had to dress them up.

So we know the earliest biscuit eaters were burly seamen

eating biscuits that were all about sustenance rather than indulgence.

But how did things develop from the backbreaking work

of men making hundreds of thousands of ship's biscuits

into the sweeter biscuits that we all know and love today?

I'm in Cumbria to meet biscuit historian Ivan Day.

So in what way does things like the ship's biscuits,

how are they a sort of precursor to the modern biscuit?

Small biscuit bakers in towns all over Britain existed

but the other side of it, not just bakers but confectioners,

they also made biscuit

and these were the upmarket luxury ones

that were aimed really at the aristocracy, the nobility and the gentry.

The biscuits that we've been looking at are very austere.

They're more about sustenance, really.

But these look very different. These look so elegant.

Well, yes, elegant's the right word

because these are biscuits from the 18th century,

which is the period of Josiah Wedgwood and Chippendale.

Sugar was very much the expensive preserve of the rich.

Sweet confectionery and elaborate, fancified biscuits emerged

out of the recipe books and the kitchens of the rich and famous.

Dining was a kind of table theatre

and this is just one of the performers, really,

in what is an incredibly structured ending to the meal.

It's the finale of the meal.

I can see in a way

that some of these were the precursors of modern commercial biscuits.

-I mean, I'm seeing a Jammie Dodger here, possibly a Garibaldi...

-Yeah.

These are like little fig rolls without the figs

and this lumpiness, the way we like a very textured, oaty biscuit nowadays.

This is almost like an early family assorted biscuit tin.

Yeah, that's what I say - a Georgian assortment.

A Georgian assortment.

What were the working classes eating?

Certainly not fancy biscuits like this.

The working classes might be having things like tops and bottoms and rusks,

-which they could buy from ordinary bakers.

-Tops and bottoms?

It just has flour in it, no sugar.

Parliaments was another thing, which was a gingerbread.

But these are things you would find in, you know,

the Duke of Wellington's dining room.

Once sugar reached a broader public it was only a matter of time

before a handful of artisan bakers and biscuit makers found ways

to combine the industrial scale of the ship's biscuit

with the fancier, sweeter tastes of the Georgian toffs.

Using the tools of the period and some excess pastry,

Ivan is keen to showcase the joys of Georgian and Regency biscuit printing techniques,

a world of great craftsmanship.

The artisan biscuit maker in the past was really serviced

by an extraordinary skill base of people

woodcarvers and metalworkers,

who provided them with these tools.

-This is the...

-The William one?

-Yeah, Sailor Bill, as he was called.

Finish them off. The ones you'd do is the round one, actually.

The Royal Volunteer biscuit.

Is that a biscuit of beauty?

Ah, look at that. Beautiful!

Like prehistoric fossils,

it really doesn't require a huge amount of imagination

to see in these elaborate prints

the future designs and patterns of everyday biscuits,

such as malted milks and custard creams.

But the biscuits of our wealthy ancestors weren't just about physical appearance.

The entire process was an altogether sensory one, too.

Imagine a little walnut biscuit baked from this mould,

a little, crisp shell put against another one

and then you break them and inside you've got a little biscuit walnut.

I can't imagine anything more endearing, more charming,

that you could put on a plate with a cup of tea.

ARCHIVE: Now we come to that great hive of industry

on the banks of Father Thames at Reading,

the huge factory of Huntley and Palmers.

From as early as 1830,

a number of artisan biscuit makers riding the crest of the industrial revolution

took the inevitable next step

towards the mass manufacture of sweet biscuits

for a much broader public.

It was a chance encounter between George Palmer,

who ran an artisan biscuit shop in Reading,

and Thomas Huntley, who had developed the machinery to modernise biscuit production,

that gave birth to the company.

Very soon, our shapeless mess of dough emerges from rollers

in the form of a rich carpet.

Once again through rollers

and it slides forward towards the machine that will shape its future.

Within a very short amount of time,

Huntley and Palmers' biscuits were being bought and sold

as far away as India and China.

By the late 19th century,

they'd become the biggest biscuit manufacturer in the world.

It's the inside man's job to pack the biscuits neatly in the tank.

Those on the outside can't see what's going on inside,

hence the job usually goes to a thin boy who doesn't like biscuits.

Since industrial biscuit making began,

whether the manufacturers were making Garibaldis, bourbons

or digestives, firms have always guarded their recipes.

At Reading University, I'm meeting an archivist

to view a very rare artefact.

This in fact is one of the recipe books.

Oh! What?

So we can actually see what was going into the biscuits.

Oh, my goodness! Oh, my goodness!

-Can I touch it?

-Yeah, of course.

New milk and butter milk, sugar number one,

butter and flour, lunch flour.

Now the Marie, now this is the Marie biscuit.

The Marie biscuit is flour, butter, sugar, condensed milk.

They're almost slightly experimental,

the fact that they're not cast in stone,

they're sort of changing them.

The thin arrowroot. So this is the recipe of the thin arrowroot,

the biscuit that my mum loved almost beyond all others -

delicate biscuits.

So a little bit of time, just me and the original recipe book -

well, under the beady eye of Alfred Palmer.

But this is the little book. This is where they're all written down

in beautiful copperplate

and to think that this is where it all began

the arrowroot, the Marie, the Garibaldi with its little currants,

and biscuits I've never heard of,

biscuits I can sort of only dream about.

I wish I could taste some of these biscuits.

Biscuits that are just lost, gone forever.

And it's not just the biscuits that have been lost.

All of the major manufacturers quite quickly established

that most ubiquitous of containers, the biscuit tin, as a household necessity.

All is not right in the world of the biscuit tin.

It's not tin any more.

You don't get that wonderful little tinny drumming sound with your fingernails.

There aren't the remains of Sellotape round the edge -

slowly you peel them off as the tin gets older.

I was always secretly trying to get the top off

without anybody hearing in the next room

and then the joy of the second layer,

of going down and finding that there's more treasure to be had underneath.

If you were really clever you could pinch one.

You wouldn't want it in the garage with nuts and bolts and screwdrivers in.

You wouldn't even keep the dog's lead in it

and those keys that you don't know what they're for but you don't want to throw away.

That's what biscuit tins are for after the biscuits.

Originally designed for transporting biscuits safely to distant customers

and for shopkeepers to refill with loose biscuits,

over time the biscuit tin was transformed

from an object of utility into something much more creative.

Very few of the Huntley and Palmer biscuits themselves remain

because they were delicious, they've all been eaten.

But the tins themselves do remain and they were a permanent gift.

It really was used as a marketing technique

and they would often create tins that would appeal to young children.

Imagine getting that in your Christmas stocking and putting that on the table.

That's a tin from Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee

and she was known to take Osborne biscuits.

Of course, she would enjoy an Osborne

and I can't imagine her tucking into a Jammie Dodger or a custard cream.

Here at the Reading Museum, there's one tin from the 1980s

that took the notion of creativity to an entirely different level.

What's going on there behind that little wall by the tree on the right hand side?

Well, this tin had to be taken out of circulation

when Associated Biscuits, who owned the company, realised

that a couple of things had been introduced into the design that were quite shocking.

On the table you can see a jam jar,

It hasn't got the word jam written on it.

-The designer's written the word "shit" on there.

-Oh, bless!

And over in the corner there, there's two dogs procreating.

Oh, how fantastic. Shit and shagging dogs, I love it.

And in the far distance, we have two young lovers doing the same thing.

I mean, Auntie handing them to the shocked vicar.

"Do have some biscuits with your tea."

I mean you would, wouldn't you, if you could?

I mean, you would.

Did you ever see such nimble fingers? She needs them too, to cope with a rush like this.

The general expansion of the biscuit industry in Britain

was inextricably entwined with the growth of rail travel.

Other companies, such as Peek Freans in South London and Carr's of Carlisle,

all became market leaders

due to their close proximity to the railway lines,

a fast and efficient way of getting salesmen around the country.

So the representative would carry that around with him,

lots of little tins of biscuits, all hinged.

It's a doctor's case for biscuits.

Imagine carrying that!

You are this guy who's walking around

and it's not cleaning things, it's biscuits.

People would welcome you, wouldn't they?

Brendan has a few final treats to show me,

hidden deep within Reading Museum's vaults.

Those are the tins. That's how my biscuit life started.

Percy Salt the grocer in Wolverhampton used to have those

and at the bottom there used to be broken ones.

The factory workers would get a pound of broken biscuits on a Friday.

The cry would go out, "Where's my broken?"

Biscuits became such a part of British culinary life

that the factory had its own celebrity visitors.

-Oh, there!

-There he is, there.

-There he is.

"Oscar Wilde, poet."

But it's interesting, because someone has come along

and introduced these three question marks in rather blunt handwriting.

I wonder when that was done.

And even letters of complaint reached the factory

from as far afield as the South Pole.

-Scott of the Antarctic.

-Captain Scott.

"We find on opening on the tins of Antarctic emergency biscuits

"that the biscuits are considerably cracked and broken

"but I think also that some change has taken place which makes them more brittle.

"The breaking of the biscuit is not really a serious drawback

"but the point might have your attention

"in case it's possible to avoid it."

I think he was lucky to get his biscuits, frankly.

And during the Great War they functioned as emotional keepsakes.

It's a First World War army biscuit

and it's one of those that has been fashioned into a picture frame

containing a soldier's portrait that was sent home to his mother.

Oh!

-Very, very special.

-Yeah.

Whilst Scott and his men's lives depended on Huntley and Palmers' supplies,

in no small way my early childhood utterly depended on a survival pack

that was of equal importance to me.

One of the best bits of my childhood

was not my Christmas stocking or my birthday presents,

it was the lunchbox,

that little box that I would take on trips, picnics, on the school bus

and I'd take the lid off and I never knew quite what was going to be inside it.

There'd be jam sandwiches, a banana...

I don't like the smell of bananas in lunchboxes.

But there'd always be a biscuit.

In fact, there'd always be more than one biscuit.

They were the biscuits of my childhood.

And as much as I envied the adult biscuits,

there were ones that I felt were mine,

biscuits I could really have fun with,

like chocolate Bourbon biscuits, custard creams, Penguins -

something that was more than just a biscuit.

It had layers.

And it was that moment of hope as you peel off the lid

and you think, "What's going to be in it today?"

"What is that extra treat?"

Sometimes it'd be a little handful of iced gems,

the ones you bite the icing off and then you're left with a boring, little biscuit.

Sometimes it'd be a salty Ritz cracker - I'd never know.

And that was part of the fun, part of the joy of my childhood lunchboxes.

I never quite knew what was going to be in there.

But I had hopes.

Like greedy time travellers,

Nicey and I are moving on to those biscuits we indulged in as young boys.

See, this is how you can make your biscuits more exciting.

-They've got a malted milk and a sports biscuit.

-Oh, yeah.

So what we're doing now is we're embossing it with exciting figures of cows

and as a child my approach to that, immediately, without hesitation,

would be to nibble the cow out. NIGEL LAUGHS

I remember thinking as a child,

wouldn't it be brilliant if you could get a reverse malted milk

that was like a mirror image, nibble both cows out,

stick them back to back - you'd have an entire 3D biscuity cow.

Starting to worry me a little.

MOOING

After a while, the biscuit guys decided

that what you can do is get two biscuits,

put them back to back and put something up the middle

and here is the archetypal sandwich biscuit, which is the custard cream.

One of the world's great ideas.

And the fabulous thing about it is you've got custard

and so to have a biscuit that should be filled with custard...

It isn't. That's something that I...

-Probably you've come to terms with, I don't know.

-Just about, yes.

And it's one of these utterly timeless biscuits.

Custard creams. Really, they were Mum's biscuits.

-Got a squashed fly biscuit?

-A Garibaldi.

-A Garibaldi.

-Garibaldi.

It's almost like an Airfix kit of a biscuit,

that you get this big slab of Garibaldi,

which you then break into individual Garibaldis.

-There's something about the way it breaks.

-Yes.

-It's a very soft break.

That is an exciting biscuit right there.

The ginger nut, the middle is all calm

and then outside here, can you see how that's all broken away

as the ginger nut's expanded?

It's like looking at an alien world, isn't it?

They find moons round Jupiter and they're all like,

"It's got a line like that little round bit."

I think it's the same with ginger nuts.

Each one has got its own story to tell

about how it was formed and how it came to life.

There you go, Nigel,

There's your other archetypal cream biscuit, it's the Bourbon.

-Hadn't they used to have more sugar on?

-Yeah

but what we're always looking for in the Bourbon is ten holes.

I've got my tape measure, because a Bourbon should be 63...

62 cm... 62 mm is what we like in a Bourbon.

-You are measuring a Bourbon.

-Yeah.

And also that thing of running your teeth down the cream.

-I know I did - wasn't supposed to.

-Yeah.

That's what your top two front teeth are,

for leaving tracks in biscuit cream.

-I can't believe I've met somebody who knows how many holes there are in a Bourbon.

-Ten.

There's a lot of memories in a biscuit for me.

The lemon puff was originally my dad's biscuit

and this was the biscuit that my dad would take up to his greenhouse with a cup of coffee

and he'd do whatever men do in their greenhouses

with their tomato plants and orchids and what have you

but he'd have a couple of these.

And then there's the pink wafer.

This was the biscuit that was always left in the biscuit tin

when all the others had gone

and it was like a sad biscuit,

it was the one that nobody wanted and I certainly didn't.

But my mum loved them.

There's something quite vulnerable and frail about the pink wafer.

It's a very gentle biscuit, very tender.

It has a sort of feminine charm to it. It's really rather lovely.

And it was Mum's biscuit.

-I'll have some biscuits, too.

-Dry or sweet?

Now, no discussion of biscuits could be complete

without the savoury biscuit, the cracker.

That's the biscuit I used to take to bed when I was kid,

a square cream cracker spread with lots of salty butter.

To this day, if I'm not very well it'll be that that I'll turn to.

All these biscuits have a personality.

I mean literally - who was Dr Oliver?

Who was Mr Jacob?

And who were the Carrs?

Most of the leading biscuit firms in Britain were run by Quakers.

It therefore seems right that the most ardent Quaker firms

were making the more abstemious biscuits.

One such company was Carr's of Carlisle,

a firm that brought Quaker values to bear on every part of their business.

I've caught up with the Beatles' biographer Hunter Davies,

who's writing a book about the firm's history.

Jonathan Dodgson Carr was a Quaker.

He was tough but he was very benevolent -

he tried to look after the workers.

This is an apprentice at Carr's in 1849

and in this contract, amongst other things, it says

that, "he shall not commit fornication

"nor contract matrimony within the said term,

"shall not play at cards or dice tables or any other unlawful games."

That's almost like a footballer's contract today.

-Well, except for...

-Apart from the fornication.

And the whole point with Quaker firms is that you think really of the future.

You're not thinking of quick profits today

and closing things down because they're not working.

The first factory had baths, they'd had school rooms,

they had libraries, they're trying to feed the workers,

not the shareholders.

I know you're writing about a group of women

who worked at the Carr's biscuit factory.

-They were called cracker packers.

-Cracker packers!

And they did what that suggests -

they stood there packing crackers into the wrapping machines.

They also had the most brilliant magazine called the Topper Off.

Why was it called the Topper Off?

Because the lady on the production line, the last lady, put the top on.

She was the topper off, so the magazine was called the Topper Off.

I was looking at a 1963 edition

and the Beatles came to Carlisle in 1963.

One of the girls, the cracker packers, had gone there

and written a beautiful first-hand account

of going to the concert at the Lonsdale Cinema.

It's one of the earliest first-hand accounts of them on tour.

Round about the time that I was saving my pocket money up for Beatles' albums

and my brother would come home with really cool clothes,

like suede boots and those skinny knitted ties...

I was looking for a new biscuit, something different,

a big boy's biscuit.

So there was the chocolate Penguin,

with its beautiful jewel-coloured wrappers.

There was the Jacob's Club with the thick, thick chocolate.

There's something different about these.

They were luxurious but they were also quite hip.

# If you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit join our club! #

But there was also the Jaffa Cake.

This was the biscuit that my brother introduced me to,

a wonderful little biscuit, but very special.

It's got a layer of sponge, which in those days was quite crisp and dry,

and a bit of chocolaty coating

and then inside, that wonderful little disc of jelly.

In fact, the whole thing's a bit like a disc.

It was like a little 45 rpm record, a little single.

You know, I'd also heard, and it may not be true,

that when the Beatles got their first royalty cheque,

John Lennon had spent some of it on an entire box, a crate,

of Jaffa Cakes.

There's good taste for you.

# Oh, you've got lots of biscuits Different shapes and different types

# But in the end we know there's one That everybody likes

# It's full of country goodness... #

But whenever I consider all those biscuits

I really loved as a growing teenager,

there's one particular biscuit I always return to - the Abbey Crunch,

which tragically stopped production back in 2006.

# It must be the oats! Yeah! #

If I reach in my rucksack here, I have something that you may appreciate.

Here we are. I saved this from 2006.

-No way!

-Yes.

Be very careful with this,

because it's possibly the last packet on the planet.

Oh! Look!

I knew that they were stopping the production of them

-and it was my favourite biscuit...

-It is the best biscuit ever.

There is no better biscuit, there will never be a better biscuit.

So this is the bit when I start to look a bit like a crazy biscuit guy.

-Well...

-But...

-This is the bit?

-Do you remember where you first had one?

Oh, heavens, yes. At my Auntie Marjorie and Uncle John's house

and out came these wonderful looking, rather cracked biscuits.

-Yes!

-They had a lovely open texture to them

and it really was love at first bite.

-When you try to make an Abbey Crunch, you can't.

-Yeah.

-And I've tried - you can't.

-Yes. Mary Berry tried to make some for me once.

-The wonderful Mary Berry.

-And they were lovely biscuits

but I couldn't look her in the eye and say that she'd done it and, yeah, that was an awkward moment.

Most of the biscuits we've eaten today,

it's just like going back through a photograph album.

-Yeah. Here we go.

-Ah, no way!

-No way! I haven't had one of those for years.

-What's that?

-That is a Café Noir, isn't it?

-It is.

Oh, there's something very, very grown up about a coffee biscuit.

Yeah, yeah. That's adult biscuit.

That is an adult biscuit, it's an adult smell.

I feel I've come of age, I've sort of reached biscuit puberty.

This is kind of the story of my life, this biscuit tin.

-It must be the story of yours as well.

-It certainly is.

I mean, I'm gazing at a biscuit right now that I vividly remember

as the first biscuit I had when I started my primary school.

-Are we talking Jammie Dodger?

-We are.

THEY LAUGH

So that is just jam in there

and it's industrial jam.

This is not jam that you'd put your toast in the morning,

This is biscuit jam. It's doing a job.

It's holding together two biscuits.

-You know like the strings on a pizza?

-Yes.

-Well, same thing.

-And you want to wrestle it apart

and you know if you do you're going to break it.

We've moved to the point where we're going to discuss chocolate.

That's a Wagon Wheel.

-You're going to talk to me about size, aren't you?

-I am. I'm sorry.

# Well, you can't help smiling When you eat a wagon wheel

# It tastes so good It almost seems a sin. #

Size is important.

# ..about a Wagon Wheel

# It's so big you've got to grin to get it in. #

-That is not what it used to be.

-So, indeed it isn't

but only slightly, because when they moved the production of these,

they changed the biscuit rollers and ever so slightly, they got smaller.

It was invented by a guy called Gary Weston.

He actually invented it very, very quickly.

They put it together from idea to production biscuit in about six weeks.

-And this was a Marie biscuit in there...

-Yeah.

..with a very thin layer of mallow

and the stuff round the outside was not chocolate.

They couldn't call it chocolate. It was called Blackpool coating.

But when they all came together it made a Wagon Wheel,

which for me was a fabulous, fabulous treat of a biscuit as a kid

-and still is today.

-It was worth spending every penny of your pocket money.

# If you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit join our club. #

This was the biscuit of the special occasion.

-I suppose, because we didn't really have afternoon tea...

-Yeah.

..when we went somewhere, like an auntie or uncle's house or something like that,

this is what would come out in a little pile on a plate,

usually with roses on, and a little doyley.

The thing about the Club is it used to have amazingly huge amounts of chocolate on there.

Where's the ruddy chocolate?

So much so that you could bite it off in lumps.

The chocolate was so thick that you could bite it off

without damaging the biscuit.

The chocolate-covered digestive. It's the nation's favourite biscuit.

-Is it?

-Yep. We do more chocolate digestives than any other biscuit.

-But for me it has to be dark chocolate.

-Really?

-Yeah.

-You're a dark chocolate man?

-I'm a dark chocolate man.

I wouldn't want to cast aspersions on your character -

that's not what we're here to do -

but people who like the plain chocolate digestive I tend to think

do have a sense of self-superiority about them.

-Am I wrong?

-Erm...

Not far... Not far off.

Let's put it this way, you hear the phrase, "Well, I like the plain ones,"

thrown back at you in a kind of mildly judgemental way.

OK. I'm a bit smug.

Maybe biscuits can tell us something about what sort of people we are,

but there's one thing we do with biscuits

that splits us down the middle to dunk or not to dunk.

So Proust dunked his madeleine.

You have to dunk a ship's biscuit in order to make it edible.

But dunking has other connotations too - it's a social thing.

In fact, Debrett's insists that you shouldn't dunk

unless you're in very informal company.

My father thought dunking was a bit common. I wasn't allowed to.

I used to dunk when he wasn't looking.

But dunking is something that I think is quite essential,

it's quite important.

There are dunking moments

and it shouldn't, I think, be taken lightly.

I'm heading off to Hull University

where, as mad scientists tend to, they conduct research

into countless everyday objects, such as the biscuit,

whether it's testing them under extreme pressure

to help manufacturers with packaging,

or igniting them to better illustrate the calorific content in food.

I'm here for another reason

to explore what happens when we dunk a biscuit into something hot.

-Oh, I get to wear glasses like you.

-HE SNIGGERS

There we are - how cool are these?

This is a very important subject to me

because there's nothing worse than that soggy debris

-at the bottom of the cup...

-The sludge at the end of your cup of tea.

-The sludge.

So what exactly happens when we dunk a biscuit into tea or hot water?

You've got to understand what a biscuit is

and biscuit is grains of starch all compacted together

and, as you know, it's made with fat and sugar

that basically is the glue that holds it together.

When you put it into water, the sugar and the fat start to dissolve

and the biscuit starts to fall apart.

What you'll also see is when we put it in the water,

the same way in which water comes up a plant,

it will actually crawl up against gravity.

Inside the biscuits on a microscopic level

there are tiny holes that act just like that, like capillaries,

and the water actually climbs up against gravity.

We're taking the nation's ten favourite dunking biscuits

and by dunking them all within an inch of their lives,

we'll arrive at Britain's strongest drunker.

Number one, the chocolate chip cookie.

We're timing it, so we can compare it with the other ones.

-The fluid is drawing up.

-It's over halfway.

-Oh! We've lost a chocolate chip.

-The first casualty.

That is a dunking disaster.

-Ginger Nut next. Is this one going to last a long time?

-I think it'll last forever.

Oh, heavens! That is going up really quickly.

-That's the old capillary action I told you about.

-Yeah.

Ooh.

This is the HobNob. Let's go for it.

Look, straight away - crumbs cascading down.

Look, all that in the bottom of your cup. Yuck.

Oh, look! You'd end up eating that with a teaspoon.

It's time for the chocolate digestive.

The chocolate formed a layer that helped hold it together.

-Ready with the custard cream?

-Yeah, I'm always ready for a custard cream.

What we'll probably find with this one is

the cream centre will act a bit like a glue to hold it together for longer.

-Next up, chocolate Bourbon.

-It's a slightly coarser crumb.

-Mm-hm.

-Digestive.

-Yeah.

-We all love a digestive.

-Complete dunking disaster.

-That just doesn't work at all.

So, Rich tea. And the clock is ticking.

It's just going to sit there, isn't it?

It hasn't moved at all.

Over ten minutes now. Still going.

It feels like a wet bath mat.

-The HobNob lasted a paltry 13 seconds.

-I knew it.

And the king of the hill was the Rich Tea,

which lasted well in excess of ten minutes.

-It's the safety biscuit.

-The biscuit you can always rely on.

Making no judgments, but there is a consumer study

that tells exactly who buys what newspaper and what biscuit.

The Daily Mail reader, the Garibaldi, the plain arrowroot

and they're quite partial to a Rich Tea as well.

The Guardian reader likes all the posh stuff -

the amarettis, the chocolate Florentines and the biscottis.

The Sun likes a pink wafer. In fact, the Sun loves a pink wafer.

The Scotsman reader will be tucking into an oatcake.

It's just what it says.

But no story of the British biscuit is complete

without acknowledging our friends in the north.

McVitie's, born in Edinburgh in 1830,

is to this day the market leader in a £2.3 billion British biscuit industry.

Its most famous creation was the digestive biscuit,

invented by Alexander Grant in 1892.

ARCHIVE: In Scotland they eat twice as many chocolate biscuits as anywhere in England.

But the Scots are merely leaders in an expanding field.

In the jargon of the trade,

the informal snack occasion has become a growth area.

As history proves, the Scots are a fiercely loyal nation

and so what better place to visit

to explore the point at which loyalty to a particular biscuit brand

verges on, well, the fanatical.

I'm here in St Andrews to meet a group of former students

who are hiding somewhere on the campus.

-Hello.

-Hello, I'm Nigel.

-I'm Alastair.

-Alastair, hi.

-Welcome.

This is where the St Andrews University Tunnock's Caramel Wafer Appreciation Society was founded,

in this very space.

We have a photograph of this room

-wallpapered in Caramel Wafer wrappers.

-Oh, what?!

Oh, what?!

This... This is so beautiful.

-I love the way it goes right up to the top.

-Yes, yes.

Except the corner that we probably couldn't reach.

It's just so beautiful.

One of our stunts, and we had many suggestions, was

to send a packet of Caramel Wafers to notable people of the day,

ask them to eat the wafer

and send back the wrapper with their autograph

and we then auctioned the autographs for charity.

Somebody sent some to Ted Hughes, the Poet Laureate of the day,

and I have a lovely letter from his wife Carol

that says, "Thank you very much for the wafers.

"Ted has now signed all the wrappers

"and I'm afraid to say I ate all the wafers,"

and back came these wrappers

and the wrappers had on them original poems or verses

that Ted Hughes had sketched on the back of these wrappers.

Our finest treasure is this, the Ted Hughes poem.

Oh, this is the Ted Hughes poem.

So this is Ted Hughes' own poem in his own handwriting.

"To have swallowed a crocodile Would make anybody smile

"But to swallow a caramel wafer Is safer."

-Beautiful, isn't it?

-Bless him.

Here's one that might interest you. Look at this.

Oh! Bless him!

-Oh, bless him, we miss him so much.

-Yes!

I love his little wine glass. Oh, isn't that a thing of beauty?

A particular moment of merriment comes from NASA,

-when we sent a Caramel Wafer to NASA.

-From NASA?

-Yes, yes.

We wrote to NASA and asked them whether it would be possible

to send a Caramel Wafer into space,

so we had a beautiful letter back from NASA which goes like this.

"Dear Mr Johnson, I am sorry to be so late getting back to you

"in answer to your letter of February 19th

"but the person who answers our mail has been out sick

"and we are badly backlogged."

-NASA!

-Marvellous, I love it.

So we followed it up and they said to us

that for the very reasonable price of between 3,000 and 10,000,

we could then have it itemised as a scheduled payload on the shuttle

but the deposit of 500 was beyond our means in those days,

so we let it lie there.

Couldn't just slip it into their tuck box?

LAUGHTER Yes!

..three, two, one, liftoff!

Liftoff.

It strikes me that this strange fellowship, alive and kicking 30 years on,

is perhaps more about the wrapper than the actual biscuit.

There is almost a sort of ritual

around eating a Tunnock's Caramel Wafer

the taking off of the wrapper, how you eat it, what you do with the wrapper after.

You have to fold the wrapper down.

-I open it right up and use it as a plate, the wrapper, like so.

-I keep hold of the wrapper.

-I just eat them whole!

-GROANING

This is really quite extraordinary.

And not a little bonkers, either.

The meeting of the old - that's the founders - and its newest members,

it's such a simple thing in a complicated world.

You have to protect the biscuit, keep it safe,

and the biscuit tin is an obvious place to keep it,

but a biscuit tin also says keep out.

An individual wrapper, on the other hand, is very different.

It's welcoming, it's inviting, that little crackle of a wrapper.

You're unwrapping a present, it's a gift, it's something special.

It's a treat.

But then when that's gone, you've still got the wrapper,

you've got this beautiful little thing,

whether it's silver or gold or red, whether it's stripy,

whether it's got a logo on it -

you've got this and this is so important.

And this is something that modern companies are forgetting.

Things are being wrapped for freshness,

they are being wrapped for safety,

they're being wrapped to be tamper-proof.

But what's that about? You're losing the ritual, it's gone.

You can fold it, you can write on it, you can use it as a bookmark.

Press the creases out of a foil wrapping...

and you're pressing the stress out of your life. It's just gone.

Given the extreme to which brand loyalties can go,

I'm keen to understand the ways

in which advertisers divide us, the biscuit buying public,

into certain types of buyers.

There are areas for biscuits, OK?

There's one which is called the share biscuit.

We're all going to share some biscuits.

Then you get biscuits such as a treat biscuit.

-Miss Cartwright, I propose...

-Mr Wagstaffe!

..that we always have Fox's biscuits.

You then get the health biscuit, so what they do

is that the perception, from a brand perception, is that this is a healthy biscuit.

Chuck a few oats in, it's healthy.

They're really delicious, light and crunchy,

with a natural home-baked taste.

Then you get the gift biscuits.

New Chocolate Wafer Fingers were invented by Cadbury's

for special occasions.

Then you have the fix-it biscuit.

If you were making a biscuit, which is a fix-it biscuit,

what kind of way would you go?

I would go chocolaty, I would go crumbly.

KIDS CHEERING

# P-pick up a penguin

# A lovely big penguin

# When you p-p-p-pick up a penguin There's so much more to enjoy

# If you feel a little more peckish... #

I spent far too much of my childhood saying...

-P-p-p-p-penguin!

-Exactly.

What was going through the advertising people's brains at that time was

this really important aspect of the child doing something.

Well, what is a child doing? Two things.

Number one, the child is doing this alliteration stuff of p-p-p-p-penguin.

"Do you want a p-p-p-penguin?" and all that stuff,

so that would go into their heads, OK?

And the second thing is that it's got this idea that each Penguin,

the wrapper was a different colour,

which meant that they were very collectible, yeah?

I've got the red colour, you've got whatever it might be,

so that was very, very clever.

# Girls are nice but, boy, what I seek comes with Oreo. #

This is about the twist, the lick and the dunk.

-This brand is America.

-Well, all gone.

Is it really the world's biggest seller?

It is the biggest selling biscuit, it is the Holy Grail of biscuits.

Actually came out about 1912, so it's over 100 years old, yeah?

In terms of a brand,

how do you make something which has such an incredible heritage

part of our own culture? That's a really big ask.

The amazing thing is is I think that they've done it.

People are twisting, licking and dunking.

One thing that still persists in the world of all things biscuity is

that ultimate of questions when is a biscuit not a biscuit?

-What's in your box?

-What is in the box is controversy.

In our Venn diagram of the biscuit world,

these are all the things that are on the outside,

they're all the things that cause people problems.

Are they a biscuit or aren't they a biscuit?

-Biscuit.

-Biscuit.

Biscuit.

I've always missed out on something.

-Because I'm not an egg eater...

-Right.

..I have missed out on that boiled egg moment

when you tap the shell with your teaspoon,

so this is the nearest I ever got,

that moment when you just tap the top and you've gone in.

What's the brandy snap doing there?

Brandy snap - brandy snap's not a biscuit.

Isn't it a biscuit? Is that a cake?

No, it's not a cake but it's not a biscuit either.

Well, it's an outlier, isn't it?

-It's an outlier, it's on the very edge of your Venn diagram.

-Yeah.

-So, biscuit or cake?

-Biscuit.

-Biscuit?

-Yeah.

-Biscuit?

-I can tell you don't agree by your tone.

Well, that one has been to court and been bounced around

and this one is now classified for VAT purposes as a cake.

-Don't start me.

-I'm going to start you on that.

-Is this a biscuit?

-Let's cut to it. It's a wafer.

It's a wafer with chocolate round it but it will not be pinned down,

it refuses to be pinned down and it doesn't want to be pinned down.

So what for you is the definition of a biscuit?

The thing that really makes a biscuit a biscuit is

the way that every type of these biscuits is the same as its brethren.

That's something that we put a lot of trust into, it comforts us,

so we know that these things are always going to be the same

and that's a point in our day where whatever else is going on,

our biscuit friends are there for us.

They are our friends.

Biscuits are indeed our culinary friends.

The containers may have changed

and the original companies may have been swallowed up,

but the biscuits themselves, all wrapped in their packs,

uniformly patterned, mass produced,

have become something that is surprisingly rare

in this day and age.

Whatever anyone says, biscuits are dependable

and woe betide any manufacturers who tamper

with this comforting constant in our lives.

You know, there are vandals in the world of sweets,

in the world of chocolates, in the world of biscuits.

They fiddle around with things, they repackage things,

-they change the shape, they change the smell.

-Yeah.

No! I want... They should all be tied to a chair

with their hands behind their back.

They should not be allowed to fiddle with things.

When they get messed with, people really can't cope with it.

These are things that are almost part of our DNA,

-they're part of our lives.

-Yes!

Leave it alone. Leave the packaging alone, leave the shape of it alone,

-the smell of it alone.

-It's like someone, you know...

It's not like losing a limb obviously, that would be a silly thing to say,

but it's like people messing with the fundamental fabric of your life.

If your fig roll is perfect with the ends open, why make them closed?

And you did tell me you've got the name of the person who killed the Abbey Crunch.

Yeah, I do, but I couldn't reveal that.