FOOD SPECIAL..........Dunking Nation

Dunking Nation 

Dipping crispy snacks in tea is inherent to our culture 

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel was such a pleasant film, so packed with performances from the best old British actors completely enjoying their roles as senior citizens trying to make their retired lives in India, that it was easy to overlook the more implausible parts, like the posh accent and absurdly wordy dialogues of Dev Patel as the young and rather scatty owner of the hotel.
But there was a moment when I felt almost impelled to protest. This is when Evelyn Greenslade, played by Judi Dench, tries to explain the intricacies of British culture to a group of young Indian call-centre workers by describing the joys of dunking. It involves, she says, "lowering the biscuit into the tea and letting it soak in there and trying to calculate the exact moment before the biscuit dissolves, when you whip it up into your mouth and enjoy the blissful union of biscuits and tea combined."


As someone who can barely eat a biscuit without looking for tea to dunk it in I had no problems with what she said. It was just the redundancy of her explaining this to a group of Indian kids who were probably dunking from as soon as they got their infant hands on glucose biscuits and a glass of milk. From there they would have graduated to Marie and cream biscuits, or maybe more local savouries like the crisp whorls of murukku (chakli) with tea or coffee at home.
    College would have meant endless cups of chai with packets of branded biscuits in the college canteen or, if they were at the tea-stall outside, unbranded biscuits fished out of big glass jars. There would have been regional variations in these:  flaky kharis in Mumbai, hard nankhatais in the North, delicate batashas in the East or thengai or butter biscuits from the potti-kadai in the South. The kids in the film were probably in their first jobs, but even then would have encountered the trays of cookies and big stainless-steel tea and coffee dispensers that herald longed-for breaks from training sessions. And if they were condemned to the misery of machine-made tea and coffee, they would know that the best way to endure this is through the medium of biscuits stored in their desk drawers for this purpose.
But why stop there? If one expands the scope of dunking then there are so many Indian dishes that depend on the alchemy of crisp solids set afloat in liquid, to be eaten while still in that transient state between firm and soggy. Dahi vadas, rasam vadas, kanji vadas and all related species, including those tending towards the raita end of the spectrum. Community specific versions like Bengali dhokar dalna and Gujarati dal dhokla, which are from opposite ends of the country, yet are variations on the same theme. There is even the inversion of dunking in pani puri where the soaking liquid is contained in the solid food.

    The British seem to imagine they have some special relationship with dunking. There are websites and articles devoted to analyzing the best biscuits for dunking and an entertaining book, Stuart and Jenny Payne's Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit-Down, based on their website of the same name, which delves deeply into the issue. "Dunking is probably as old as the first hot meal cooked by mankind," they write, and suggest it started with the Sumerians, but then skip straight ahead to Queen Victoria! Dr.Len Fisher, a physicist based at the University of Bristol has even conducted experiments to determine the best way to dunk - not straight down, he says, but at a near horizontal angle, so that most of it gets wet, but a thin top layer stays dry and supports the wet layer against total disintegration.

    But as all those Indian examples show, dunking is well established here too and even in the West one can find many examples. The French, for example, can boast of the great literature inspiring dunking of Marcel Proust who famously starts his novel series, Remembrance of Things Past, when a fragment of a small pastry called a madeleine dunked in lime-blossom tea starts him remembering the same drink from his childhood, and then the whole world attached to that. The Germans have many dumplings that are dunked and eaten in soup. The Dutch have their insanely delicious stroopwaffels made of waffles sandwiched together with caramel. These are eaten by first placing them over a hot cup of tea or coffee to soften, so that, in a sense, they dunk in the steam.
Vikram Doctor CDET130830