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.
