Overview

Name: Garibaldi

Manufacturer: Tesco

Price: £0.85

Packet weight: 200g

Summary: Understated but unrevolutionary

Dunkability: Don’t bother.

Allergy advice: May contain nuts

History of the biscuit

History is inherently boring, but the history of this biscuit means that although we can not talk about it, we’re going to say that we can’t not.

We can’t not talk about the boring history of this biscuit.

This biscuit’s origins lie in the story of the revolutionary Michael Garibaldi, who unified the Italian peninsula in 18?? CE after his successful biscuit-designing revolution.

Following a long campaign, in which Garibaldi ingeniously used ordinary, delicious vinegar to dissolve the mountains blocking his path, the cooks of his assembled armies reported that depleted vinegar reserves meant that the army could no longer be sustained by traditional meals of fish and chips. They were also running dangerously low on curry sauce. With soldiers on the verge of mutiny – wholly devoted to his martial brilliance but also peckish – the general sat on the banks of the river Rubicon to devise something superior even to fish and chips before crossing the river.

Unfortunately, he produced the Garibaldi biscuit.

History doesn’t record whether he succeeded in unifying the nation of Italy once he achieved the goal of inventing the eponymous biscuit.

Review

In life, it is true that biscuits are commonly not wholly biscuits, and the Garibaldi sits neatly on the biscuit-cracker dividing line. A divide unfortunately not honoured by the biscuit production values, with the individual biscuits coming in sheets of six, connected by flawed breakage fault-lines. This often results in random biscuit sizes and ugly, potentially dangerous jagged edges if the biscuit snapper is distracted or imprecise during pre-eating biscuit preparation.

The irregularity of the biscuit size is matched by an inconsistent surface glaze throughout the pack, and variable raisin distribution ranging from quite a lot of raisins to not very many raisins per cubic inch.

Although the soft biscuit itself is largely tasteless, each bite taken provides a variable amount of delicious raisins, and the combination of the crumbly texture with fruit chewiness gives the sense that this is first and foremost a raisin delivery vehicle in the guise of a biscuit-cracker combo.

However, the simplicity of this biscuit stands in stark contrast to many others available today. In this adrenaline-filled modern capitalist system, consumption is driven by excess, and ostentatious new biscuits adorn our supermarket shelves, demanding that we overindulge.

Not so with this humble treat, and in the relief from the general biscuit surfeit, the unassuming Garibaldi allows us to fully satiate ourselves, gorging on its raisiny goodness until we can gorge no more.

For dunking purposes, the otherwise tasteless biscuit upon dunking becomes infused with the taste of its dunked medium, giving a sensation of eating a dense cup of tea filled with raisins. While eating a cup of tea may sound appealing, in this case it was unusual and unpleasant.

Conclusion

The Garibaldi biscuit is a reasonable addition to any biscuit eater’s biscuit line-up. Unfortunately, we have been informed the version we sampled were both not good quality, and not even ordinary Garibaldi biscuits. Making this review completely pointless.

Look out for our future review, actually Garibaldi biscuits.