Thursday, July 30, 2009
The Hard Dunk - a love that never fades
Thinking back recently upon my travels to England when I was very young, one recollection arises unbidden and repeatedly. In fact, I have never truly stopped remembering it, with desire tinged richly with regret. Of all the good things, it’s the one I’ve missed most consistently; amid the bad things, it always softened the blows. There’s not much to be said about it, but the articulation of those meager memories reifies them for me - helps cement their sweetness in the shifting matrix of memory. Sure, they’re just cookies, but these are cookies I’ve craved for forty years - and a forty-year craving is worth a few lines of blogscrawl, I should think.
The England of my recollection from 1970 was a place of ludicrously rich foods. Milk came in bottles the top quarter of which was pure cream that would stick to my spoon as I ate my cereal; chocolate was tangibly thick with fat. The ice creams were a disappointment texturally, but were plenty sweet enough if not too much so. The national punch, “squash," was sold in a concentrated form that was hallucinogenically sugary. And while cookies, per se, did not exist, the range of baked goods available in their stead more than made up for that deficit: hot scones drowning in butter, cakes and tarts of every description, gateaux and jellies and puddings unlike anything I’d ever tasted - and, of course, the ubiquitous, if seemingly inaccurately-named, “biscuits.”
I was used to thinking of biscuits as the crumbly love-child of a cracker and a dinner roll, typically served with gravy and certainly not dessert fare. Not so in England, though. An English biscuit could go from bland to overwhelmingly glucose-laden, covering a wide range of the flat baked confection genre. Big’uns, li’l’uns, thick’uns and thin - “biscuit” was a generously inclusive term for one of my very favorite kinds of food.
In the panoply of biscuit-dom, I found much to admire and many to recommend - but one stood out so far above the rest that my longing for them persists to the present day. What I recall of them may be gilded by the artistry of memory, but, if so, not much. There just wasn’t that much to remember, and I’ve held onto it so devotedly.
The biscuits of my beloved memory were dunking biscuits, though I can’t vouch that that was their actual name. They were square, about two inches to a side, and baked to a rich dark color. Significantly, they were hard. Damn hard. The other noteworthy quality possessed by these biscuits was that the top was heavily glazed with brightly colored images of simple familiar things - a tree, a house, a tiny car - simplistic to the point of being juvenile, but crisply rendered in bright colors made entirely of thick, plaster-like sugar. This, in combination with the high tensile strength of the biscuit itself, made for a confection of unrivaled rigidity. They were designed to be softened up by being dipped in milk or tea; eaten out of the cardboard carton, it took all my youthful masticatory vigor to work through one, and I actually recall having sore jaws after enjoying two of them dry in quick succession.
After we returned to L.A. at the end of that trip, we occasionally did some shopping at English specialty stores - the sorts of places that sold crumpet mix, mushy peas, and Bird’s custard. I always looked for the dunking biscuits at such shops but I never did find them. When we returned to the fair and pleasant land six years later, I arrived with high hopes of renewing my acquaintance with the hard biscuits, but no dice again. And since then I’ve checked at any number of brit boutiques and limeytoriums - all to no avail. Even on-line searches - which officially turn up everything - have proven unsuccessful. My beloved dunking biscuits seem to have utterly flown the coop.
The longer I look for them, the more I want them. So you can take this as a whining rant, a cry for help, or what you will. Just so long as one of you tells me how to get some of those damn biscuits again. Otherwise, what is the internet even for, anyway?
Coming up when I get around to it: rusty truck and dinky mountains! You can’t afford to miss it! Don’t make my site tracker hunt your sorry ass down! because that’s an extra charge and I don’t think I’ve subscribed for that part of the service, you know.