You imagine the scene: a dark and sleazy establishment serving drinks, but in the back room, hard-core habitués share bites of banned biscuits of every sort, while reveling in vices of the flesh.
Oh, not bar ‘an establishment where alcohol and sometimes other refreshments are served’, but bar ‘an amount of food formed into a regular narrow block’. On which turns a confession by Tim Brookes (of the Endangered Alphabets Project, based in Vermont; website here) on Facebook today:
Back in England, and straight away the old vices return …
In particular, the vice of McVitie’s Penguin biscuit bars.
Before I go on, I will admit that on rereading a previous posting of mine on Penguin biscuit bars, I immediately ordered a 6-pack as a little present to myself on my birthday. They won’t get to Palo Alto for a while, but I can wait for this small pleasure from my times living in the UK (not to mention my many years of immersion in penguins as a totem animal).
From this blog, my 5/3/19 posting “Fill me with chocolate cream”, a compact survey of the Penguin bar world, with images of the packages:
(#1) A penguin on the front, a penguin joke on the back
And of the actual bars:
(#2) Chocolate on the outside, chocolate on the inside
Oh yes, a reminder from NOAD:
noun biscuit: North American a small, typically round cake of bread leavened with baking powder, baking soda, or sometimes yeast. British a cookie [AZ: or other sweet chewy treat] or cracker.
September 17, 2024 at 7:54 am |
My packets of Penguin bars arrived in Palo Alto yesterday (9/16). They are small (3 x 1 x .25 inches), but each little package is dense with information: the penguin image and logo on the front, ingredients on the back, along with a goofy penguin joke (Q: What type of pasta do penguins eat? A: Penguine.). and along one side, some piece of information about penguins, like how many fish a typical penguin eats in a day (15, according to my latest Penguin bar). And, yes, I’m enjoying the chocolatey crunch and the memories of the UK.