The digestive biscuit was invented by doctors who thought it settled stomachs
Two Scottish doctors created the digestive in 1839 on the theory that its baking soda worked as an antacid, and chemists once sold it beside indigestion powder. Today McVitie's shifts 80 million packs a year in the UK, and a box of them once set off a quarrel inside the Beatles.
The name reflects a Victorian belief rather than a proven effect. Sodium bicarbonate in the dough was thought to neutralise stomach acid, and some makers added diastatic malt extract to break down part of the flour's starch before baking. An 1851 advertisement in The Lancet offered brown meal digestives, brown meal being the modest fraction of the grain left once millers had removed the coarse outer bran and set aside the pure white endosperm. By 1912 it was better understood that this meal carried the germ, which is what gives the biscuit its gentle sweetness.
Huntley & Palmers of Berkshire were advertising digestives in 1876, and a Scot, John Montgomerie, won a US patent in 1890 for malting bread that included digestive instructions, pitched as nourishment for people with delicate stomachs. McVitie's of Edinburgh began baking its version in 1892 to a secret recipe by Sir Alexander Grant, and in 1925 it added a chocolate coating, first sold as the Chocolate Homewheat Digestive and still made at the firm's Harlesden factory in London. Bill Bryson called it a British masterpiece.
A typical biscuit is made from coarse brown wheat flour, sugar, malt extract, vegetable oil and wholemeal, raised with bicarbonate and acids, and comes to roughly 70 calories. In a 2009 poll the chocolate version was Britain's favourite biscuit for dunking in tea, with the plain one fourth. Cooks crush digestives into cheesecake bases and the Ulster traybake known as Fifteens, and restaurants put them on cheese boards. Despite a persistent rumour, they are not banned under their name in the United States.
The Abbey Road story comes from the engineer Geoff Emerick. While the band were listening to a playback in the control room in 1969, Yoko Ono helped herself to George Harrison's McVitie's. Harrison snapped at her, and John Lennon lost his temper in return.
Source: Digestive biscuit
