How Marie biscuits got their name

What do Marie biscuits and the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town have in common? It's all in the names.

In 1874 Queen Victoria's second son, the Duke of Edinburgh, married a Russian princess called Maria Alexandrovna. She was the fifth child and only surviving daughter of Emperor Alexander II of Russia and his first wife, Princess Marie of Hesse and by Rhine. As the youngest sister of Alexander III of Russia, Maria was also the aunt of the last Russian Tsar, Nicolas II.

To celebrate the duke's wedding to his new duchess, a London pastry chef from the biscuit-making company Peek Freans made a simple round biscuit of flour, oil, sugar and vanilla extract, with the name Maria stamped in the middle, and around the edge a Greek key pattern, which was very popular in Russia.

The duke was Victoria's son Prince Alfred, who, 14 years before in 1860, had made the first visit by a British royal to the Cape Colony. Then just 16, midshipman Alfred was tasked with ceremonially dumping the first load of stone into Table Bay to begin the building of a proper breakwater for Cape Town's harbour. Two basins were built over the next decades, the first named after him and the second after his mother, Victoria, who never visited the Cape or any of her other colonies.

The basins are, of course, still at the heart of the modern Waterfront - the functioning harbour having been moved further out into the bay.

Maria biscuits soon became Marie biscuits and proved lastingly popular. They were copied by bigger firms, Huntley and Palmer. The two firms later merged, and Huntley & Palmer exported Marie biscuits in tins to many countries, including SA.

Baumann's, based in Durban, was the first to make Maries locally. JML Baumann bought his first biscuit plant in 1883 and built a factory in Brickhill Road in 1885. It produced biscuits known as hard tack, a long-lasting but not very palatable food eaten by sailors. 

In 1895 Baumann bought a plant capable of making more complex biscuits. His "Fancy Biscuits" included Maries, which Baumann's copied from the imports.

These sold for a shilling a pound, at first in tins to keep them crisp, before the invention of moisture-proof wrapping.

In 1910 Alfred Baumann joined the family firm, and tweaked the recipe to improve the biscuits until they were as good as or better than the imported ones.

Baumann's changed its name to Bakers Biscuits in 1915 because of anti-German feelings, two years before the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha changed theirs to the House of Windsor for the same reason.

By the time Princess Maria died in 1920, her biscuits had become a South African favourite, loved by generations of children.

Marie biscuits are produced in many countries, and are still one of the most popular biscuits in SA, one of our right-royal iconic brands.