Thursday, March 12, 2009

of hard biscuits and coffee







when i was young, we would eat these hard biscuits after they had been soaked in coffee for some time. you could eat them as they were but we preferred to eat them soft, after it had absorbed some of the coffee.

the biscuits would expand and swell up after floating in a bowl of coffee for a while. sometimes we would use a metal spoon to fish the soggy biscuit out of the bowl. we used a bowl instead of a cup so that we could have more pieces of biscuit in the coffee at one time. those days we had our coffee, black, without any condensed milk added.

i preferred to soak these hard biscuits than the round marie biscuits because the marie would get soggy very quickly and then disintegrate. in the case of marie biscuits, we normally dipped them in the coffee before putting them into the mouth.

i think back then, there was no nescafe or instant coffee and if there was, it was considered a luxury item. i do not think we could have afforded a coffee-maker, even if there were one. my mother would send us on erands to the kampong's coffee shop to buy, usually, 20 cents worth of coffee. i would carry a small kettle or an enamel container with a cover to get the coffee from the shop. i remember going the coffee shop, early in the morning, before i started for school.

sometimes i would take along two eggs in a container to the coffee-shop and asked the owner to pour hot-water into the container. by the time i got home, the eggs would become half-boiled. i would knock the eggs into a saucer and add black sauce to it and then slurped the stuff.

some days we would buy the coffee without the sugar added and then when we got home, we would add our own sugar. that way, we could get more coffee for the same amount of money.

8 comments:

Lam Chun See said...

The biscuits in your top photo look just like the 'dog biscuits' we used to eat in the army compo rations.

PChew said...

I too like eating the hard biscuits soaked in coffee when I was young. Now I like to eat it as it is still crunchy.

yg said...

chun see, i thought the dog biscuit was rectangular rather than squarish.

yg said...

i like the biscuits hard and slightly burnt. there was a brand which was popular then. cannot remember the name of the brand.

Anonymous said...

Those days, there were a few different kinds of crackers sold, but Jacob’s cream crackers were really the best. I would break the crackers into smaller pieces, soaked them in a mug of Milo with condensed milk, and ate them soft, especially when I was sick. These crispy crackers really had no taste whatsoever; they were so dry, and if eaten plain, unadulterated and on their own, munching on these crackers could be messy.

yg said...

mr nah, jacob's crackers, ya, we ate when we were not well. when we visited friends in hospital, we sometimes presented them with a box of jacob's crackers, together with tins of condensed milk and milo or ovaltine.

Anonymous said...

wa! mr ong! i also eat my biscuits like that! in fact, i eat all the 3 brands u mentioned here: jacobs, marie n the square ones with no name. wow... didn't know i'm from the same generation as u... =P (tal)

Anonymous said...

ailing, sometimes i still eat the (hard)biscuits his way - soaked in coffee.