From now until Christmas Eve, I’ll be posting a new blog entry every day – an advent calendar of pop culture nostalgia, festive trappings and assorted… biscuits?
In my garage I have several venerable biscuit tins, which, I am happy to report, do not contain venerable biscuits. One of them serves as a repository for plastic cowboys – well, they have to live somewhere – whilst another contains marbles.
These tins – and they are all tin, as opposed to the plastic variety we get today – are survivors of many a Christmas past when a box of biscuits was invariably gifted to us by one of the family’s friends or relatives. Judging from a recent trip round the supermarkets, this is one festive tradition that shows no sign of abating. Of the many biscuit assortments we were given at Christmas, the most popular was, without a doubt, Family Circle. In 1967, the pop trio Scaffold sang ‘thank you very much for the Family Circle’, although to this day I’m not sure if it was the biscuits they were referring to or the popular women’s magazine. On balance, I’d go with the biscuits…
Family Circle is still sold in recognisable packaging, and comprises an assortment of biscuits made up of the following varieties: shortbread, chocolate digestives, custard creams, chocolate chip cookies, jam sandwich creams, milk chocolate fingers, crunchy oat, Nice and Bourbon creams, a line-up which hasn't changed much if at all in over fifty years. Today's Family Circle is sold by McVitie’s, but the branding was originated by Huntley and Palmers, as my vintage tin illustrates.
I was reminded of this festive comestible tradition while browsing recently through some old annuals. Teddy Bear, produced from 1964 until 1981, was a nursery title, derived from a children’s weekly paper of the same name. The 1967 edition has, for its endpaper, an illustration of various different kinds of biscuits, many of which can still be found in Family Circle, whilst others may prove a little harder to find today.
The first thing that struck me about this page was how nicely some of the illustrations had been handled – look at the grids on those Neapolitan wafers: this is an artist who knows his or her stuff. Just don’t ask me to eat one of those, because I’ve hated pink Neapolitans since childhood…
The Bourbon is also excellently rendered, and the whole spread is a good example of what was once known as 'duotone' printing, using black with, in this case, pale red as a second colour. The brown tones are achieved by combining the two.
The next thing that struck me about this spread was to wonder how many of these biscuits could readily be obtained from any supermarket in 2024. Well, many of them are still to be found in Family Circle, but there are a few here that aren’t on McVitie’s radar. The real head-scratchers are the Chocolate Vienna (I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such a thing) and the curious ‘Fondant Finger’ which looks like something that’s just emerged red hot from a blacksmith’s forge. Were these ever a thing?
Clearly, the ‘chocolate crisp’ is a Kit-Kat in all but name, while the Chocolate Cream seems to have evolved into today’s ‘Oreo’. The various creams remind me of how little I cared for biscuits like this. I’d eat them if there was nothing else available, but I’d much prefer a chocolate digestive (very evocatively painted) or a Maryland Cookie (wasn’t that a trade name?) If I was ever offered a Custard Cream or similar, I’d begin by carefully breaking off the top, thus turning it into two biscuits for the price of one – a plain biscuit and one with an iced topping.
As to the Lemon Puff, I’d forgotten they even existed before turning to this page. Awful things these – the kind of pasty that instantly makes a mess when you bite into it, and sugary lemon icing inside. Nasty! I imagine the ‘Fruit Puff’ must have been a variant of the same thing, although it’s hard to tell it apart from the Garibaldi above. Is there anyone in the civilized world who doesn’t refer to these as ‘squashed fly’ biscuits? I wouldn’t touch them as a kid, but these days I reckon one would go nicely with a cuppa.
The wild card here is the Sponge Finger, more properly used as the base when making trifles. Would anyone want to eat one ‘raw’ (so to speak)? I can remember doing so many years ago and being rather repelled by the excess of sugar. Even as a child, I knew my limits (if you’ll pardon a biscuity pun).
On the whole, this was a nicely illustrated spread, with one example. Can you spot it? For me, it really stands out alongside the carefully rendered Bourbon and creams. It’s the Ginger Nut. It’s almost at the end of the spread and I reckon the artist got this far down and thought ‘sod it, I’m not going to paint in all of that texture.’ Hence it’s just a lot of impressionistic swirls. It's also worth pointing out that the biscuits shown on the vintage tins were also artists’ impressions whereas today, most packaging makes use of photographs – often heavily rendered and retouched on a computer, but photographs none the less. And before long, it will all be done in AI...
I almost always get given a box of biscuits at Christmas – never Family Circle, mind – but this year may well prove to be the last, as the neighbour who has provided them for the past eleven years has just put her bungalow up for sale. If you get any yourself, take a moment to reflect that, although they may not be the first thing you think of when Christmas comes around, festive biscuits go back a long, long way. And when you’ve finished eating them, you’ll have somewhere to put your plastic cowboys and marbles…
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