The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food — Wheaten Biscuits – Ulster's Madeleine?

There were always wheaten biscuits. In a tin. Up in the corner cupboard. In a Tupperware container. Probably going slightly soft because they were slightly off. In fact as I write this, across Northern Ireland there will be hundreds if not thousands of wheaten biscuits slowly losing their crunch in sealed plastic containers in cupboards, brought for visitors, returned to their boxes, only to be brought out duly once more for the next and the process to repeat itself all over.

Wheaten biscuits were made with wholemeal flour, butter, sugar and then coated again in caster sugar, or dipped in chocolate and then sprinkled with hundreds and thousands. Or they could also be covered in icing and then, again, covered in hundred and thousands. They were always the biscuits leftover on the plate when we had visitors. I would carry the tray back to the kitchen after the guests had left, and there would always be one or two wheaten biscuits left amid the empty cups and crumbs. They were the poor relation, biscuit-wise, the budget DIY biscuit. However, they had a charm and deep flavour.

Were they Ulster’s version of the madeleine?

I can’t think of a better alternative. To eat one now would be to be transported back to those Sunday afternoons in the lounge, with all the aunties and uncles gathered for the weekly gossip, talk of who’s died, who’s nearly died, who’d be better off dead, mixed with raucous laughter, and lulls in conversations punctuated with a long drawn out inhaled ‘Aye’ from an uncle to break the reflective silence. I’d sit in the corner and listen to everything, rarely saying a word, rarely being asked to speak, just sitting and listening. And that was my childhood: not eating wheaten biscuits listening to a room full of adults talking on a Sunday.