BEHIND THE CRAFT
image

When East Meets West

Making Remarkable Connections has shaped The East India Company, transforming the world with fusion of cultures, materials and skills.

We remember and celebrate these not only in our choice of ingredients but also in our design work that transports through storytelling.

Enjoy one of our biscuits and cast your eye on the carton. You’ll see a shape that instantly takes you to India, the Taj Mahal of Agra. India and The East India Company’s history, inextricably linked.

Underneath, a beautiful Arts & Craft pattern. William Morris, the celebrated designer of this movement adored the colourful, artisan textiles of India. His designs are considered quintessentially British, but in fact he was enormously influenced by the patterns and colours of the Kashmir shawls, silks, indigo-dyed cottons and garments of South Asia.

We bring together east and west in celebration. Enjoy your biscuit!

FGBI12108

Ginger Nut Biscuits

Net Weight: 150g

With the bold, warming flavour of ginger spice - one of The East India Company's first discoveries - this distinctively crunchy ginger biscuit has been the reigning favourite for many years.

The East India Company - Lifestyle

Biscuits

-
+
£8.00
The East India Company's very first voyage was in search of spices in the Far East and over the next two hundreds, the Company was at the heart of global trade of many diferent spices and exotic ingredients, of which ginger was one. Ginger was prelevant in China [where it is indigenous], India and the 'Spice Islands' themselves [the Moluccas in Indonesia today], the latter being an area of some 'disagreement' between the European heavyweight powers of the 1600s.

We mark the role of the original East India Company in the global ginger trade, with one of ginger's best tricks - the Ginger Biscuit, one of the most popular dunking biscuits in the world. (you can find out more about dunking in our story below!)
If you'd like to read a little more about the Company and it's trade in spices, read our short story "EIC, Trade and Spices" over a cup of tea and a biscuit of course.

Ingredients

Wheat Flour, Sugar, Partially Inverted Refiners Syrup, Vegetable Oils (Vegetable Oils & Fats, Water, Salt, Natural Vegetable Colours: Annatto, Curcumin; Flavourings), Eggs, Raising Agent: Sodium Bicarbonate; Ground Ginger (0.5%), Ground Nutmeg, Salt


Allergens

Manufactured in a bakery that handles nuts & sesame seeds
Contains milk and gluten

Nutrition

Typical values 100g – Energy 1905kj/455kcal | Fat 16.2g, of which saturates 7.7g | Carbohydrate 72.7g, of which sugars 43.2g | Protein 4.9g | Salt 50mg


Storage

Store cool and dry. Avoid sunlight and strong odours.

Suitable for vegetarians.

Stories

Still dunking after all these years

There has always been a good reason to dunk a biscuit. The Romans dunked their bis-coctum [twice-baked] biscuits in wine to make them edible. Later, the pioneering sailors of The East India Company, dunked their ‘hard tack’ into beer to soften it to eat.

There's still a good reason today to dunk, but now it’s less about dentistry. Quite apart from the sheer guilty pleasure of melting the chocolate on a biscuit in your cup of tea, it's about the science of flavour release!

Here we doff our cap and dunk our biscuit to physicist Len Fisher. In his attempt to make physics accessible, he stumbled on something that captured public imagination back in 1998. He asked - what happens when you dunk a biscuit? Why might it fall apart into the cup leaving a sludgy disaster at the bottom? Why do some dunk better than others?

He noted that a biscuit can have all sorts of splendid ingredients but it's fundamentally starch glued together with sugar [not a classic marketing positioning]. In hot liquid, capillary action pulls the tea or coffee into the heart of the biscuit. The starch grains swell and soften – which is good. But the sugar which holds things together, melts and the structural integrity is lost and the biscuit will collapse – which is not so pleasant.
Dr Fisher used an equation to work out how long it would take for the liquid to be drawn into different biscuits. He found the optimal time for a ginger nut dunk was 3 seconds, whereas a digestive could have a more leisurely 8 seconds.

He wasn’t done: a year later, he experimented again, this time to work out what drink gave the best dunking experience. He showed that milky drinks were best, because the flavour molecules in a biscuit are most easily absorbed into the little fat droplets in milk. Because these fat droplets hang around in your mouth, the flavour molecules sit on the tongue for longer anc crucially are released to the nose, the home of the majority of our smell receptors.

So it was proven - one of our biscuits is made even better by a cup of tea with a splash of milk. Dunk on.

Our spirit delivers no ordinary products

  • FAQ

    How long will the biscuits last once opened?
    Once opened, they should be stored in an airtight container and consumed within 30 days.

    Where are your sweet biscuits made?
    Our sweet artisan biscuits are made in the United Kingdom.

  • Delivery & Returns

    UK Standard Delivery: £3.95
    UK Next Day Delivery (mainland UK only): £9.95 (Order before 12pm)
    International Delivery is available, please see our delivery page for details. For more information and Terms & Conditions, please see our Delivery page.

  • Reviews

£185.00 £185.00