10 Jan 2025 / Shooting the Breeze

Biscuit As Bauble

Have you encountered Mephistopheles?

McVitie’s or Brittania, the redoubtable Marie biscuit was my mother’s four o’clock companion. Except an occasional ginger biscuit, she stayed loyal and true to Marie. Originally created in 1874 as Maria Cookies by Peek Freans {to commemorate the marriage of the Russian Grand Duchess Maria Alexandronova to Britain’s Prince Alfred (1874)} the biscuit became a coloquial Marie. My mother’s tryst with Marie apart, there’s a lot to be said about biscuits. Outside the pale and pupils of Prof. Google, the very first biscuits were simply dried bread, made to match this simplest of foods. Then, at a point (I don’t know which point) in the third millenium BCE, the Mesopotamians discovered that twice baking grain made it not only sweeter but also kept it good for longer. Flour was baked into a loaf of bread which could be sliced --- the first rusks were born. Closer to our times, in the 17 th century CE, these twice baked bread rusks were still made all over Europe. A French traveller Jean de Thevenot writes: “inhabitants of this island (Santorini in Italy) live very meanly. Their bread is Bisket.…as black as pitch and so hard, one can hardly swallow it”. Fact is, the islanders of Santorini lived on biscuit rather than fresh bread due to lack of firewood ; they bought all their wood from the neighbouring island of Nio. This made baking expensive business. And so, “…the islanders never heat their ovens except twice a year…” It made clear sense to store bread as biscuit. That, and much more is history of the biscuit. It trotted along very nicely until coming of age in the 1800s. That century also birthed the biscuit tin which had its heyday uptil the 1970s and still survives as curiosity. A cousin of mine now in his sixties still rues the tiffin of two paltry Marie biscuits cemented with butter. The tiffin was life hazard. With such a paltry repast to sustain him, he was perenially hungry. But (there’s always the but) he bore hunger like a man well before he became a man. I suspect he used his wit, scholarship grades and eloquence (still in full flow) topped by the general goodwill he continues to inspire, as he received tributes of non-biscuit lunchboxes from those not as gifted as him. That’s how he would have survived biscuit laden as lunch-box boomerangs.

I also remember the now extinct art, which though woefully short, took after the Japanese tea ceremony. The reference is because of the precise quality, quantum, baking of pre-set biscuits. In this, during the impoverished and suitably socialist 1970s India, middle-class folk got their biscuits baked directly by a baker: home-made biscuits. All very pseudo and very cumbersome if you ask me. It floated a lot many boats however -- the baker was temporary fledgling emperor, the woman of the house was hailed as a very enterprising and creative individual with a social conscience, the local micro economy was abuzz in happy hum. It was the baker who deigned to accept your indregients, indicate delivery speed and time, allow/disallow your presence in the baking process, take your money with nonchalance and hand over the biscuits. Along the way, also snitch a measure of igredients. These backyard gigs were ruled by, where I lived, a certain Golden Bakery.

Chafed by the rude baker who was too insolent for his station, my mother bought an electric oven and announced to her dinner table constituency, her decision to make home-made biscuits. She tried, to disastrous results. Her solution was a neo convert poor Christian (PC) of indeterminate background. A widow with a brood of, I think, six or seven squiggly children. Quantity of offspring apart, they were numerous and they were incredibly squiggly. Of that I am certain. It was to be a win-win: the PC would be helped monetarily, given a portion of the confectionary as gratuity and mother would have her biscuits. An afternoon was chosen, ingredients readied, the oven fired up and the impromptu baker, a self-proclaimed specialist in shortbreads, arrived. She came with her squigglies however. Ingredients were launched, biscuits were put to bake and the world seemed to be at a very pregnant peace. There’s aways the spoiler of a ‘but’ to everything in life. The ‘but’ here was that as each succesive tray emerged from the oven, the squigglies were tasked by their mother dearest to taste the stuff. Each tray was not quite up to the mark and as punishment the PC children were ordered to finish the biscuits. This went on until there were no more biscuits to bake. The ingredients were exhausted, the kitchen was a mess, the day was almost over. The PC was politely requested to be gone, richer by a hundred rupees and a few hand-me-downs, not to mention an early gorging dinner of biscuits. Cutting to the chase, neither the biscuits nor the PC were ever seen again. The oven was donated to a cookery class and our tango with watch-as-you-bake-home-made biscuits ended like many well intentioned poorly executed minor duds of life. We moved back to the dour world of over-the-counter packaged biscuits.

There are several biscuit varieties, and then some more, across the swath of ingredent, recipie, shape, colour, taste, brand, packaging than I know. The ungaily dried piece of bread as subsistence birthed biscuit as curiosity-novelty before it grew up to become ubiquotious. An entirely useless snack, bereft of any vestige of nutrition. Taste yes, conversation carrier, yes. Anything else, a definite no. I remember cream biscuits which had to be split apart and licked for the cream (orange was the most popular flavour I think) on the sly. You were belted if caught in the dreadfully cheap act of licking the concocted cream which cemented biscuits. In our case the sin was an unforgivable and cardinal one because being respectable and well-to-do was a state of being absolutely non- negotiable and impossibe to escape. It was one of the two things my parents agreed on {I forget the other}. For my part, from an early age I have lived outside the pale of polite, well-to-do, respectable society as choice. Long ago, I had found this state of being affected, unreal and forever on the wheel in terms of the degree of respectability one could climb and clamber up to. I, therefore, cultivated a taste for cheap biscuits, the sort which were even lower down the pecking order of contemporary India’s ubiuitous ParleG. The bridge between the two was the fact that perforce of habit, one dunked the biscuit in the tea. My confectionary came from an old man who used to carry home- made biscuits in a tin trunk tied to the carrier of his bicycle. In worn out clothes, he had a very dignified bearing though and was meticulously clean. My tuppence travelled farther with roving biscuit-man. He liked me, spoke a little Indian accent English and gave me two biscuits for free or one cheap scone (called cream-roll) I could choose. The other upside was that I could offer some to the urchins and dogs who were my fraternity --- long gone days but still sharp in recall as I summon things past. As I tell you this irrelevant to you and completely passe story, I relive the sight and the smell in pantomime – sounds are in ether somewhere, gone like the rest of it all.

Biscuits reign on, unfazed and steadfast against changing tastes and times. Until ofcourse, like all else the multiple times bred, crossbred dried preserved bread crumbles upon itself. Unlikely, as I see it.