Both Philo & I remember liking a kind of shiny-surfaced, flat cookie with a raisin filling when we were growing up in the Chicago area, but we hadn't seen them in years. The flat bars had perforations to break a larger cookie into smaller rectangles.
Recently I read a tweet from
James Alexander Sinclair , of
Blackpitts Garden, revealing that his Biscuit Blog now had
its own twitter account. These aren't American-style baking powder biscuits split to enclose sausage or drenched in gravy... they're what we might classify as cookies.
When Garibaldi biscuits were spoken of on the blog the historical name didn't seem to connect with our cookies of memory, but the photos looked right. Philo's family and mine lived less than a mile apart and our parents shopped at some of the same stores. It's a long time ago, but we think the cookies/biscuits were not bought not in packages but in bulk at the bakery department of a long-gone Chicago chain of department stores called
Goldblatts.
Online searches turned up Crawford's Garibaldi Biscuits. While still deciding how nuts it would be to order them and pay the shipping, we stopped for other products at Spec's liquor store here in Austin and found the Garibaldi Biscuits on an aisle of imported treats. They look the same and taste pretty close to what we remember, although the ingredients say "currants" and we're pretty sure the version from the 1960's were filled with raisins. The wrapped and packaged biscuits don't seem to be as chewy as those sold loose and exposed to air from glass bins.
Patient GardenerJane Perrone wrote
a post for the biscuit blog musing on the origin of the name Garibaldi Biscuit. A web search turned up a children's book called Garibaldi's Biscuits, written and illustrated by Gonzo artist
Ralph Steadman, collaborator with Hunter S. Thompson on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and apparently... lover of biscuitry.
ED Oct 12 AM Was giving credit to the wrong person for that original Garibaldi post - sorry Helen!
