LONDON — This traipsing through Britain, this endless unpacking of the strange foreign tribe that is the royal family — it cannot end without an investigation into the subsistence traditions of the native peoples.
We are going to need to talk about McVitie’s.
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The McVitie’s Digestive biscuit. The McVitie’s Rich Tea biscuit. The McVitie’s brand, which tastes like Britain itself, like the country’s past and future.
Lately, McVitie’s has been in the news because Prince William has requested a McVitie’s groom’s cake, based on a dessert he used to eat as a kid. The recipe circulated online: butter, chocolate, Rich Tea biscuits.
A palace aide has been ferrying back and forth from the London McVitie’s factory — the company also made Queen Elizabeth’s wedding cake — to make sure the design is right.
McVitie’s is bigger than the wedding. McVitie’s might be bigger — or more central to daily life — than the royal family.
Have a seat, love. Have a cookie. Have, at least, an omnipresent cookielike substance. Tea’s on.
But first, a gastronomical education. A biscuit primer from the most sumptuous British person we can think of.
Nigella Lawson? Please explain the McVitie’s biscuit.
“Ooh,” says the domestic goddess.
“Well,” Lawson says. “It’s plain. It’s the equivalent of the old-fashioned English nursery, where children were always made to eat a slice of bread before the slice of cake. In the cookie world, it’s the equivalent of the bread. It can go soft without losing its shape, and it doesn’t fall easily into your tea when you dunk it, and there’s something in the texture like wet sand that has been dried out, which sounds unpleasant but it’s not.”
What it is, literally: wheat flour, sugar, vegetable oil, raising agents. The digestive was invented in the 19th century as a digestion aid, Victorians being oddly preoccupied with their intestinal tracts. The Rich Tea is a more crackerlike alternative.
What it is, metaphorically: The McVitie’s biscuit is the unifying food of England. They are eaten after tea. Or they are eaten before tea. They are eaten as snacks. They pinch-hit for meals. Fifty-two McVitie’s biscuits are eaten every second. So beloved is the biscuit that Prime Minister Gordon Brown set off a firestorm dubbed “Biscuitgate” in 2009 when he refused to publicly declare allegiance to a particular flavor.
McVitie’s is what you eat because you are British because you eat McVitie’s.
Several years ago Lawson concocted a recipe for digestive biscuits and put it in one of her cookbooks.
“But it’s not quite the same,” she says. “This is one of those foods where the authentic version is made in the factory.”
To the factory, then. To the largest biscuit factory in Europe, where 27 million biscuits are produced every single day, where the air smells like hot sugar, in the northwest London neighborhood of Harlesden.
“Ninety-nine percent of British households purchased biscuits in the last year,” says Miranda Lacaze, who works for the McVitie’s parent corporation, United Biscuits. That’s according to a survey done by Kantar Worldpanel, a European market research firm. “Only 95 percent said they bought toilet paper,” Lacaze continues. She pauses. “I don’t really want to know what the other 5 percent are.”
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