ISSUE 57, DISCONTINUED PLEASURES, Part 1: Sunshine Raisin Biscuit

Sunshine Raisin Biscuit

Sometimes you have to see something to realize you haven’t been seeing it.  While shopping at my favorite Asian grocery in Columbia SC I would myself in the cookie and candy aisle (an aisle I rarely explore since I don’t have much of a sweet tooth).  There I ran across Ego brand Sultana biscuits.  I had a flash of recognition: a version of my dad’s favorite cookie (or was it a cracker, or a biscuit?)—flat, rectangular raisin biscuits.  Not very sweet.  Golden toasty color on the top, dark seeps of raison here and there.  I’m sure I hadn’t seen them in 20 years. 

I bought the Sultana biscuits, tasted them: not quite right.  It didn’t get the chewy nature of the crust on the original.  So I do what food historians do: research.  What I remembered was the Sunshine Golden raisin biscuit.  And I read the story of its discontinuance in 1996 when Keebler bought the Sunshine Company and axed the raisin biscuits, as well as hydrox and half a dozen other cookies.  I suppose the cookie archons at Keebler decided that the raisin biscuit was not marching in lock step with the sugaring of America and had to go. 

You know I had learned at age nine, when my cherished Washington Senators baseball team was sold to become the Twins, that ownership’s care for their customer base was a very calculating thing; and when the replacement senators were sold again in 1971 that capitalism’s calculations meant that besides creative destruction, there was a destructive destruction not much spoken of.  I wonder what my father, a right wing intellectual and free marketer if there ever was one, would have said if he had lived long enough to see the one cookie he liked vanish from the face of the earth? 

Now some of you might try to console me by saying that Crawford’s Garibaldi cookies can be mail ordered. The Garibaldi cookies are made with currants, not raisins, and are too crisp and too sweet.  A quick google search informs me that nostalgia for this cookie is widespread, and that a half dozen recipes exist for this cookie.  But you know the home made version won’t have the industrial precision of the old Sunshine original. 

It is so much easier to revive the flavor of once popular plants, because usually someone has saved the seeds somewhere.  Old products when they go, are so much more difficult to bring back.