BEHIND THE CRAFT
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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!

FGBI12106

Traditional English Digestive Biscuits

Net Weight: 150g

A dash of coarse sea salt heightens the sweetness and firm buttery crunch of these double cooked traditional digestive biscuits. Made from a recipe inspired by the long sea voyages of the 1600s.

The East India Company - Lifestyle

Biscuits

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£8.00
Whilst digestive biscuits today are often preceded by the word ‘chocolate’, back in the day the ‘digestive’, as the name indicates when you pause for thought, actually had a medical origin.

It was a pair of Scottish doctors who, way back in 1839, added some sodium bicarbonate to the usual biscuit mixture of flour, sugar and butter, with the objective of aiding digestion due to the antacid properties of this extra ingredient.

They had invented the Digestive Biscuit. McVitie’s would no doubt thank them.
We love a good historical story behind an item of food, it somehow elevates the otherwise apparently ordinary.

Ours is a ‘Traditional’ Digestive – with the ingredients mentioned, plus a little malt extract to give extra crispness and a slightly malty flavour note. Finally, a touch of sea salt accentuates all the other flavours, producing a biscuit with a classic sweet and savoury flavour.

Which makes it suitable for tea and coffee of course, but also wonderful with a slice of mature cheddar and some pickle.

Ingredients

Wheat Flour (29%), Salted Butter, Wholemeal Flour (24%), Sugar, Oatmeal (2%), Malt Extract, Skimmed Milk Powder, Raising Agents: Sodium Bicarbonate, Disodium Diphosphate; Salt


Allergens

Manufactured in a bakery that handles nuts & sesame seeds Contains wheat, oats, milk, gluten and may contain traces of egg

Nutrition

Typical values 100g – Energy 2028kj/484kcal | Fat 24.5g, of which saturates 17g | Carbohydrate 58.2g, of which sugars 18g | Protein 7.8g | Salt 0.52g


Storage

Store cool and dry. Avoid sunlight and strong odours.

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

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