by Manish Dutta
Something has been bothering me, but before I come to the bother itself, I want to begin with something I noticed while working in a supermarket in Hamburg.
During Christmas in Germany, many sweet things appear more visibly on the shelves. Some of them are there year-round, but around Christmas, they seem to sell more, disappear faster, and become more prominent as traditional foods. One of these things is Kemm’sche Kuchen, a sweet biscuit (or cookie?) associated with Hamburg. I had seen it in the supermarket before, but during Christmas I began to notice it more carefully. Last night, while reading about it, I found that its recipe goes back to 1782 and that it is still presented as a traditional local product.
What interested me was not only its history, but its ingredients. Kemm’sche Kuchen has, among other things, cloves and cinnamon. I mention this because cloves and cinnamon are also common in Bengali doodh cha, or milk tea. For milk tea, the milk is not added at the end; the milk and a bit of water are boiled together with ginger, cardamom, cloves and sugar. It then slowly turns into a dark, thick sugary concoction. Over time, we started eating Kemm’sche Kuchen by dipping it into milk tea. In that sense, it reminded me of a Bengali habit: dipping Parle-G biscuits into tea. Dipping a biscuit into tea makes it softer and infused with the flavour of the tea. And the softened Kemm’sche Kuchen tasted good, which made sense because the flavours were not completely foreign to me. The cinnamon and cloves created a small bridge between a Hamburg biscuit and a Bengali cup of milk tea, which also contained cloves and cardamom, and it stimulated just the right places in my brain.