I'm not sure why I haven't written about Bath Olivers before, as they're a very Greasy Spoon thing. "Fortt's Bath Olivers". The most elegant biscuit ever created, in my opinion: generously large, soft to the touch, light on the taste, with that quirky indented impression of their inventor, the good William Oliver, Physician of Bath.
It is thought that Oliver invented them around 1750. I suppose, in a way, Bath Olivers are really just like any other, more ordinary, dry cracker, but they do have that certain something which is hard to define. An Englishness perhaps? In Rudyard Kipling's charming children's book "Puck of Pook's Hill' they evoke the nostalgic Edwardian idyll of Kipling's Sussex manor house, Bateman's (cue Elgar's Nursery Suite):
...they were not, of course, allowed to act on Midsummer Night itself, but they went down after tea on Midsummer Eve, when the shadows were growing, and they took their supper—hard-boiled eggs, Bath Oliver biscuits, and salt in an envelope—with them. [...] Everything else was a sort of thick, sleepy stillness smelling of meadow-sweet and dry grass."
Puck of Pook's Hill, illustration by Sir Arthur Rackham, 1906
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