

The typical digestive biscuit contains coarse brown wheat flour (which gives it its distinctive texture and flavour), sugar, malt extract, vegetable oil, wholemeal, raising agents (usually sodium bicarbonate, tartaric acid and malic acid), and salt. Despite rumours that it is illegal for them to be sold under their usual name in the US, they are, in fact, widely available in the imported food sections of grocery stores and by mail order. Montgomerie claimed this saccharification process would make "nourishing food for people of weak digestion". patent, titled "Making Malted Bread", included instructions for the manufacture of digestive biscuits. This patent asserted a prior patent existed in England dated 1886. patent application, which was granted in 1890. In 1889, John Montgomerie of Scotland filed a U.S. A recipe was given in Cassell's "New Universal Cookery Book" of 1894. Rival biscuit company, Edinburgh-based McVitie's, has Golden-baked their best-selling digestives to a secret recipe developed by Sir Alexander Grant since 1892. ĭigestives featured in advertisements for the Berkshire-based biscuit company Huntley & Palmers in 1876, with digestives sold by chemists alongside indigestion powder. By 1912, it was more widely known that brown meal included the germ, which lent a characteristic sweetness. After 10% of the whole grain's coarser outer-bran coat was removed, and because the innermost 70% of pure endosperm was reserved for other uses, brown meal, representing only 20% of the whole grain, remained, consisting of about 15% fine bran and 85% white flour.

At the time, it was asserted that grain millers knew only of bran and endosperm. In an 1851 issue of The Lancet, London's advertising section offered brown meal digestive biscuits. In 1839, digestives were developed in the United Kingdom by two Scottish doctors to aid digestion. History Įarly 20th century McVitie & Price's Digestive tin box, located in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London The chocolate variant from McVitie's is routinely ranked the UK's favourite snack. In 2009, the digestive was ranked the fourth most popular biscuit for " dunking" into tea among the British public, with the chocolate digestive (produced by McVitie's since 1925) coming in at number one. įirst manufactured by McVitie's in 1892 with a secret recipe developed by Sir Alexander Grant, their digestive is the best-selling biscuit in the UK. Historically, some producers used diastatic malt extract to "digest" some of the starch that existed in flour prior to baking. The term digestive is derived from the belief that they had antacid properties around the time the biscuit was first introduced due to the use of sodium bicarbonate as an ingredient.

The digestive was first developed in 1839 by two Scottish doctors to aid digestion. A digestive biscuit, sometimes described as a sweet-meal biscuit, is a semi- sweet biscuit that originated in Scotland.
