![]() ![]() Only yesterday, I went to Anna Higham’s launch of her wonderful book The Last Bite, at which her take on Hobnobs were served to the disappointment of absolutely no-one. ‘The biscuit has a unique relationship with the factory,’ Flood writes ‘not only as an industrially manufactured product, but as a food intimately bound up with the routines of work (and leisure) that the factory system produced.’īiscuits are a food group that connotes a certain authenticity and democracy, as food writers from Nigella Lawson to Ruby Tandoh have observed. Flood posits that there were three things that made the biscuit so central to the construction of British identity: slave-produced sugar from the West Indies that made them cheap and available to the working class their unexpectedly perfect pairing with milky tea, that together formed the tea break and the ease at which they were industrialised, which allowed for people across the country, no matter what social class, to experience the same sensation (a hundred years before Warhol made the same observation about Coca Cola). I came across the quote in an excellent essay on the industrialisation of the biscuit by Catherine Flood, in the book ‘ London’s Kitchen: Industry, Culture and Space in Park Royal ’. ‘The way in which the British eat is as formally structured as a Bach sonata,’ the social anthropologist Mary Douglas once wrote ‘but there is one coda: the biscuit’ ![]() We, the British, don’t have a fully coherent cuisine, but we do have Hobnobs, Digestives, and Jaffa Cakes. My mum did not lovingly feed me wet rice with her hands, nor okro stew, but the tea soaked mush of Rich Tea biscuits. Like all British people I was born with a biscuit in my mouth.
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