It’s a war out there.
With a crunch, crackle and a munch, the battle for the biscuit is being fought on every supermarket shelf. It’s popping up at checkout counters with mystical phrases for messages: “Zindagi mein Life!” proclaims one brand. Read that one backwards and it still does not make sense. “ Dude ,” you want to say to the copywriter, “you’re just selling a biscuit!”
That, of course, is the point. It’s no longer just a biscuit. It’s a million-dollar industry, with packaging, placement and multi-media promotions driving the challenge to conquer the nation’s taste buds.
This is when the binge biscuit eaters (BBEs) rewind to an earlier age.
You either had a cookie; that soft, crumbly, made-in-a-local-bakery item with the baker’s initials stamped crudely on the top; or you had a crisp factory-made biscuit. The first variety now goes by the name of “artisanal”. Pune’s Kayani Bakery still gets the prize for freshness. The second one is all about branding.
It’s about creating a feel-good image in the mind. You don’t just eat a biscuit, you go on a magic fantasy sliding down pools of pure chocolate saying “Yummm!” You whirl about in congealed layers of strawberry, or mango, or orange and pineapple cream, while experiencing a sugar high. Most of the new luxury biscuits are high on sugar, or its substitutes. Along the way, a new brand says, “Hello Panda”. While others still cry “Go woman go! Fully loaded for a fully loaded life”. Or, if you are a woman, you must want to eat like a horse — oats, wheat husk, bran, buckwheat and millets. We predict that coming in a packet just around the corner are Amaranth biscuits and quinoa with slogans such as “Hamara Amara” and “Be a Quinoa Queen”.
Let’s not be too harsh on today’s tendency to load the biscuit with healthy additives. Even in the golden era of the BBEs, biscuits had image issues. They were either meant to appeal to princesses or the plebs. Britannia’s Marie, now Marie Gold, leads the pack. It was created to mark the marriage of the Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna of Russia to the Duke of Edinburgh by a bakery in England in 1874.
Russians have inspired some famous biscuit puddings. Charlotte Russe, for instance, uses a type of thin biscuits called “Ladyfingers”. They are lined along a cake tin and filled with a creamy gelatin-fortified filling, or soufflé, to make a gorgeous pudding. It could be a more aristocratic cousin to the “Marie Biscuit pudding”, layered with chocolate that is also called a Sri Lankan frozen cake; or the even more distant trifle pudding that, of course, uses sponge cake instead of biscuits. Do we include the American version of cheesecake in this category? The recipe does call for crushed digestive biscuits as a base. (Marie biscuits are never crumbly or dark enough to satisfy American standards. They are memorable for being bland.)
Who will not confess to a secret delight in dipping a Marie into a cup of hot sugared tea and taking small nips along the edges to create fantasy shapes? Talking of shapes, whatever happened to those animal shapes that used to be the provenance of the J.B. Mangharam brand long ago?
The Indian foray into factory-made biscuits arrived on the cusp of the Independence movement. Amongst them, Parle Biscuits, that started in Ville Parle in Mumbai, is now billed as the largest Indian biscuit maker. In its heyday, the Parle Gluco biscuit with the image of the little girl clapping her hands suggested both sweetness and health.
The original packing had an English-style milkmaid in a red, blue and white-coloured landscape, not unlike the Union Jack that it was trying to defy. Their circular Monaco salted biscuits, with a crisp outer skin, were the preferred base for cocktail canapés of the more sophisticated hostesses of the 1970s.
Maybe that’s what biscuits are all about. They bring out the inner child. Who can forget the thrill of scraping off the inner layer of chocolate from a bourbon biscuit and leaving the plain half for a brother or sister? Or wipe the crumbs from a Sunday morning in bed?
Biscuits are life’s Zindagi moments.
