CURIOSITY

Who does not have an old recipe book or perhaps a notebook written by hand by our grandmothers who jealously guarded what today is aridly defined as “know-how” and which once consisted of knowing how to make traditional sweets and biscuits with skillful dexterity … As far as our specific field is concerned, it is true that each biscuit has its own history and its own why and if we browse the web we find that this is full of stories and anecdotes more or less documented or linked to legends and curiosities on the history of the various types of biscuits. Today I’d like to share and summarize with you some of these curiosities related to these inevitable protagonists with tea, breakfast or as a break. The most varied anecdotes link the origin of the biscuit already to ancient Greece, passing through the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages up to the nineteenth century when industrial production began its widespread diffusion thanks also to the classic teas of bourgeois saloons, where biscuits could not be missing. Among the “classic” products that have been successfully offered for generations we find the “Oswego“, a classic Anglo-Saxon biscuit that apparently owes its name (Oswego) to the city of the homonymous county in the State of New York at the mouth of the Oswego river, which in the ancient Iroquoian language (osh-we-geh) indicates a “place of pouring” (like a mouth). The analogy between biscuits and the mouth of the river would lie in the fact that a plant called Monarda Didyma grew in that area; such a plant was used by the Native Americans to obtain an infusion with a mint flavor. It is said that towards the end of the 1700s it was the natives who introduced this plant and its herbal tea to the settlers, which then began to be used as a substitute for traditional black tea, accompanied by biscuits that took the name of this herbal tea. Another example is the famous Oreo, whose name is the subject of various theories: it could derive from the French “or” (which would recall the original packaging in gilded paper); or from the Greek “oreos” (beautiful); or there would be an etymological reference to “oros” (mountains because originally these products had a pile of sugar on top, recalling the shape of a mountain); or they would refer to the syllables “RE” (in the word “cream”) enclosed between the two vowels “O” (of chocolate). As for the very popular “PETIT BEURRE”, attention must be paid to the true original version which would be made up of the 4 corners (the 4 seasons) with the 52 scalopped edges (52 weeks) and 24 holes (symbol of the 24 hours). And what about MARIE: a biscuit with a personal name! It seems to have been created in London by Peek Freans in 1874 to celebrate the marriage between the Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrova of Russia and the Duke of Edinburgh. The DIGESTIVE, on the other hand, apparently owes its name to two Scottish doctors who in 1839 created a product that could facilitate digestion with ingredients that, at least at the time, were considered helping in digestion. A curiosity about this biscuit: it seems that Prince William is so fond of it, so much so that his wedding cake would have been a variant of our Chocolate Salami with Digestives instead of the Saiwa petit biscuits. At the end of this short journey we remind the SPECULOOS whose name could be related to the Latin “speculum” or “mirror” (by virtue of the specularity of the process where the forming mould is “mirrored” with respect to the biscuit itself), or it could always be related to Latin but this time to the term “species” or spices.… And the stories could go on. One thing is certain: whatever your favorite biscuit is to taste, to propose or to produce at an industrial level, relying on the long experience of Errebi Technology is a guarantee of the success of the final product, from the most classic to the most innovative ones, passing through reinterpretations in terms of engravings, resizing and weights of the product!