Saturday, January 13, 2007

a short background on the Kit Kat

I figured that my initial readers (friends & family) don't really have much of a clue about the interesting history of the Kit Kat. So... I've taken some of the wiki and printed it here for all to read. Please note that all the following content is published on Wikipedia.org and can be found at this address: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kit_Kat

The traditional four finger version of this chocolate bar was launched in September 1935 in the UK as Rowntree's Chocolate Crisp (price: 2d). The two finger version was launched May 15, 1936. Rowntree's Chocolate Crisp was renamed Kit Kat Chocolate Crisp in 1937, and subsequently just Kit Kat after World War II. The name is believed to have come from the Kit-Cat Club, an 18th Century Whig literary club founded in the reign of James II and located at Christopher Catling ("Kit Cat")'s pie-house in Shire Lane, by Temple Bar. A meeting place of the Kit-Cat Club had such low ceilings that paintings hung inside needed to be especially short. Such paintings were later named after the club as 'Kit Kats', as was a type of mutton pie. The Oxford English Dictionary (1989) writes:

Kit-cat / kit-kat. {f. Kit (= Christopher) Cat or Catling, the keeper of the pie-house in Shire Lane, by Temple Bar, where the club originally met.}

The traditional bar has four fingers which each measure approximately 1cm by 12 cm. Kit Kat Chunky has one large finger approximately 2.5 cm wide and was introduced in 1999. Kit Kat bars contain varying numbers of fingers depending on the market, ranging from the half-finger sized Kit Kat Petit in Japan to the three-fingered variants in Arabia to the twelve-finger Kit Kat Tablet bars in France. Kit Kat bars are sold either individually or in bags, boxes or multipacks. In the UK and Canada, Nestlé also produces a Kit Kat ice cream; and in Malaysia, Kit Kat Drumsticks.

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