Priyanka Joshi wanders along the baker’s street in old Delhi and finds biscuit-making, in fact, was a centuries-old, home-grown tradition
A cup of tea with crisp, golden-brown biscuits may be an unfailing comfort food and pursuit of Indian life but is wrongly almost wholly attributed to the British colonial legacy. Fact of the matter is that we have had our own home-grown biscuit-making tradition, that of shortbreads, which later morphed through cross-cultural interactions, to emerge as flaky biscuits that Europeans so loved.
“In fact, biscuits were a popular snack as early as 1660 when French traveller Francois Bernier tasted sweet variants flavoured with anise. It wasn’t until 1847 that British firm Huntley and Palmers began to ship the colonialists’ favourite tea-time treats,” says Farukh Abdul from Exelsior Bakery in the Chitli Qabar area of old Delhi, which has perfected the art of baking over centuries.
Peeping through his pile of biscuits, buns and rusks, Farukh expertly filters orders from an unusually large clientele of the old city who have acquired a generational taste for confectionery. He offers me a stool in his hole-in-the-wall establishment and gets busy plunging his dough-filled pancake ladle into a cavernous oven behind him. At the same time he pulls out another plate from its dark recesses.
Farukh believes in the virtues of a traditionally wood-fired oven over the electric ones, saying the biscuits do not rise up as beautifully as they do in these brick-lined chambers. “They remain fresh, crumbly, light and bouncy,” he tells me in between preparing a tray for a wedding trousseau.
“This year, people are gifting biscuits over traditional sweets because they last longer and are easier to carry. Besides, biscuits are not regarded as Western imports. You could call cookies, British,” adds Farukh who has been more than 50 years in the bakery business, growing up under his father. I prepare to get my lesson.
THE NAUGHTY NANKHATAI
He tells me one of the first desi style biscuits was the nankhatai, a derivative of the fresh bread loaves that Dutch settlers brought to Surat while trading in Indian spices.
When the Dutch left India, they handed over the bakery to one of the their trusted employees named Dotivala. But locals never developed a taste for European bread.
Some bakers used sura (sap from the palm tree or toddy) instead of yeast to ferment the dough, hoping it would be spongier and attract more customers. But there were few votaries of alcohol in food. So the leftover bread would become dry and crispy and was sold to the poor at discounted prices. Commoners liked the taste of this inexpensive, dried out crispy bread and ate it by dunking it in hot tea.
An enterprising Dotivala changed the shape of the bread and dried the slices in the oven. This oven-dried bread became what we know as the “Irani Biscuit,” another of Dotivala’s early marketing strategies to give his product an exotic, Persian identity. Irani Zoroastrian immigrants were already known to have set up bakeries and cafes in Mumbai due to lack of capital to establish themselves in trading or any other industry.
Other bakers tried to tweak it in the manner of Dutch butter biscuits, using six ingredients — semolina, gram flour, flour, sugar, butter and nuts (almonds and pistachio). Enterprising Gujaratis took it to Mumbai and from there to almost every tea stall in India. It was much later that baking powder and eggs were added to the original recipe. Dotivala created his own fusion by incorporating elements of a Gujarati sweet called dal.
He even modified the European puff pastry to make khari (salty) biscuits, spiking the top layer with ajwain, thereby creating a sort of a layered version of the Punjabi maathri. “The north Indians started to produce their eggless version of nankhatai without any leavening at all. Without any leavening, the recipe started to resemble the European shortbread cookie and became very popular during the days of the Raj,” says Farukh.
Mohamad Aqil, from Golden Bakeries on the same lane, says “Eggs enhanced the taste. But up north, we added jaiphal and elaichi. Among other flavours, chocolate, almond, pistachio, sesame, coconut and mango are quite popular. Vanilla essence and saffron are also added for an extra zing.”
THE ZING OF JEERA
A girl asks for cumin biscuits that Aqil lovingly wraps in brown paper, so that it soaks up remnant greasiness, and ties it with white thread. He shares some trade secrets: “These biscuits are more salty than sweet. We use copious amounts of butter and the magic lies in the warm, woody aroma of the cumin seeds scattered in the dough. The original variety is chewy in the centre even when baked thoroughly. You need to mix flour, semolina, sugar, salt, egg and cumin seeds.”
If you want the eggless variety, hop into Diamond Bakery right next door. Jeera being good for digestion, these biscuits are usually preferred for morning and evening snacks.
A HEARTY FIll
A crispy crust laced with fruit chunks, coconut and poppy seeds baked to perfection, Dilkhush biscuits stand true to their name. The original recipe uses a dough made in the manner of a regular pie. The kick comes from super delicious candied papaya chunks typically known in India as tutti frutti. The papaya chunks are steamed and glazed in sugar syrup. Says Farukh, “My father told me these began as pancakes in China, where it’s called bing. The French galette has a similar concept. Our ancestors got the recipe during their travels.”
He takes filo pastry sheets and puts a thin layer of ghee on half of the sheet. Then he roasts poppy seeds for a minute and mixes coconut and khoya. He spreads the mixture on the other half of the sheet and sprinkles sugar. Finally, with an expert toss, he places the half pastry disc on the mixture and seals the pastry sides by pressing forks. Fifteen minutes later, I get a plump, golden roundelle, exploding in a burst of flavours.
You should enjoy this pastry-like biscuit while it is still warm. The mouth-watering Dilkhush will remind you of your childhood days, when the baker used to cut a freshly baked pie into squares.
BOURNVITA STIll WORKS
We all loved the chocolate drink powder while growing up. And these biscuits remind us of our blissful days in the playground. “These are my fusion experiments. Good food not only tickles our tastebuds but also brings back some good old memories. This particular cookie is a variation of the kiwi chocolate chip and you could add chocolate chips if you wanted. The raw cookie dough is delicious. This is specially for children,” says Farukh, who has sworn to keep up our cookie cutting-edge indeed.
SIN IS IN
Golden and Champion bakeries are popular in these parts for their original biscuit and cake recipes. Aqil of Golden has, over the years, understood the value of ambience and has dotted his establishment with yellow lights which lend a halo and shine to his bakes. He takes me up to his laboratory on the first floor, reached by a creaking spiral of wrought iron stairs. The baking station can, believe it or not, accommodate only three persons. I watch from the landing as Aqil’s colleague Ravi gets busy with his peanut butter chocolate mix.
He has been mixing flour, butter, white sugar and chocolate with a hand-held spatula non-stop for the last 10 minutes. “Nothing like the human touch in folding and letting the air and moisture in bit by bit,” Aqil tells me.
Once done, Ravi rolls out the dough on a flat table, sprinkling whole wheat flour to stretch its edges. After that, he uses a cutter to make diskettes. In the end, he tops them with egg wash and peanuts and bakes them in the oven at 120 degrees. Fifteen minutes are worth the wait.
“Peanut cookies were quite common for centuries. These, however, called for crushed/chopped peanuts as ingredients. It was not until the 1910s that we found peanut butter listed as an ingredient. The first peanut butter recipe was for rolled cookies. So now we experiment with this recipe and give it different twists. I use chocolate,” adds Aqil.
DRY FRUIT DElICACY
Dry fruits make a delicious combination with butter and have been traditionally tossed into the basic mix of refined flour, powdered sugar and fat (preferably clarified butter or ghee). They may be flavoured with cardamom powder, are round and baked till crisp and pale brown. Says Farukh, “Store these in airtight containers away from humidity and moisture.
Since there is a high butter content, there are chances of the biscuits going rancid if not sealed in properly. These simple butter cookies strongly resemble the English teacakes and the Scotch shortbread. But once immigrants took them to America, they underwent some changes. The Southern colonial housewife there took great pride in her cookies, flavouring the finest butter with rose water and dry fruits.”
THE MAlABAR lINK
In the 19th century, Bappu, a member of the Mambally family, had been to Burma to learn about biscuit-making. After a couple of years, he returned to his hometown. In the year 1880 or so, he started the Mambally Royal Biscuit Factory at Thalassery which served almost 40 different varieties of biscuits, rusks, breads and buns.
The Britishers were their chief patrons. In fact, the bread dough was made by crushing wheat in crude stone grinders and using local toddy for fermenting the dough until the Britishers imported yeast into the country.
As the story goes, in the December of 1883, a British planter, Mr Brown, who owned a large cinnamon plantation asked Mambally Baputti to bake him a Christmas cake and shared the recipe with him (some say Baputti smelled out the ingredients!). The cake turned out to be better than what Mr Brown had expected. And the rest, as they say, was history. In its heyday, the bakery would export their hand-made delicacies to Egypt, Mesopotamia and Myanmar. From then on, bakeries spread all over Kerala and diversified in their products.