1. Shrewsbury biscuits, Kayani Bakery
"Pune's iconic delicacy"
“Visited this renowned old bakery in Pune for the first time, attracted by its fame for Shrewsbury biscuits and more. However, our experience was disappointing due to the rude behavior of the employees. They seemed uninterested in engaging with customers, expecting quick transactions without any interaction. While they may have excellent bakery products, the lack of customer service left us with a less-than-pleasant experience.”
reads the first Google review of Kayani bakery, a fact which caused me to laugh out loud.
The lack of customer service is the point, it’s what they are selling— along with fat little mawa cakes and brown bread and khari and of course Shrewsbury biscuits. It’s not even just a lack of customer service. It is keener, ruder, the feeling that the staff not only doesn’t care about you, they might actually kind of hate you. People love antipathetic eating establishments— part of the great puzzle of humankind, this love of aggressive hospitality— and Kayani Bakery has the same vibe. Lavkar lavkar. Jaldi jaldi. Quick quick. If you don’t already have the menu memorized and your order ready to spit out to the guy across the shoulder-high glass counter, that’s on you. You had the whole wrap-around queue, marked with stands and ropes like an airport bag drop or Disneyland, to think about it. And anyway, didn’t you just want Shrewsbury biscuits?
The worst case scenario is you panic, you dissociate, the guy asks what you want and you kind of look around dazed and say you want a kilo of Shrewsbury biscuits and also half a kilo of wine biscuits and a small loaf of white bread, and as the counter guy, weaving left and right, his head disappearing behind the head-high counters flanking the small section where you order and pay, starts to fill a handleless plastic sack with crispy wine biscuits with a huge scoop (this scene only visible obscured through the piled cookies and cakes that impede your view), you realize what you have done, which is ordered 1.5 kilos of cookies, which is, wait, oh my god, over three pounds of cookies??? You pay some extra rupees for the extra bag: a mild blush passes across your face. And then you carry these cookies under your arm out from the colonial portico of the bakehouse, and you plan who you might gift these cookies to (for who indeed would not love half a kilo of Kayani’s Shrewsbury biscuits? They are even eggless) and realize that this worst case scenario is not so bad at all. Perhaps the brusque pace is bullish for sales. I do not begrudge them.
“Pune people,” a term which I think stretches to encompass the many people with Pune aunts or people who came for college, will not be surprised that I began this little encyclopedic project with the iconic Shrewsbury biscuit. A site that ships regional treats pan India calls them “Pune’s iconic delicacy.” Shrewsbury biscuits are certainly a contender. They are tender as a fresh-broken heart. They taste of Amul butter and artificial vanilla. Comforting and therefore moreish, I dare not recommend to you a serving size. In a future newsletter, I will sleuth the question of whether having a round of snacks with tea before preparing a second, more proper, hot breakfast is a my-husband’s-family thing, a Pune thing, or an Indian thing. But for now let me say that these cookies count. You can very house a stack of these round cuties before 7:30 AM and still be counted a respectable member of Pune society, as far as I can tell. Of course, they are also great late at night and with afternoon coffee.
Each shortbread is stamped with KAYANI BAKERY SHREWSBURY encircling the bakery’s logo, a bizarre clip-art-y goateed baker in a huge floppy hat holding a layer cake on a stand but gazing instead winkingly at the viewer. I would love to know more about the history of this image. The logo— on the bags, the brown paper packages tied up with string (!!!), the cookies— actually means something. There is only one Kayani bakery. “We have no branches.” I love their whole “accept no imitators” thing, especially because the product is so unremarkable, on a level. The ingredients are maida, sugar, cream butter, milk product, baking powder, custard powder and vanilla extract. The texture is that of an industrially produced shortbread. AND YET! They are so good, they are so, so good, for awhile we would send a Dunzo guy across the city in his teal and black jacket to bring a box to Kothrud for us despite the fact that other (inferior) Shrewsbury biscuits were available at the corner grocery.
This isn’t Puneri nativism: I am not native. And it’s also not just hype, because Kayani Shrewsbury biscuits aren’t in any way cool. I queue between uncles and aajis. So I can’t really explain it. But Kayani Shrewsbury biscuits are, somehow or other, a global platonic ideal cookie.
There is a lot else to say— about Parsis and “oven culture” and smoke and colonialism and post-Partition Maharashtra and patyas and rudeness. But we’ve got plenty of time.
OK: just one thing about colonialism. Under British rule, the building that houses Kayani bakery held an Italian-owned restaurant and dance hall, which explains the marble dance floor and stamped tin ceiling. The facade of the building still bears the original proprietor’s initials: E.M. (E Muratore). Only post-Independence did the Kayani brothers arrive in Pune from Iran and found the eponymous bakery in 1955.
One time I was describing these biscuits to a friend in the U.S. and mentioned that Pune is “weirdly famous for shortbread.” A little glitch, like sometimes I forget I have a whole-ass Ph.D. in this kind of thing. And so I then realized, of course, that there is absolutely nothing weird about Pune being famous for shortbread, being as it was the summer capital of the Bombay Presidency, housing as it did so much of the Bombay command of the Indian army and before that the army of the East India Company. Kayani bakery is deep in the cantonment area of the city, and so driving, you pass the Bombay Sappers with their red socks pulled to the knee and the Western Command Sixth Division and the Turf Club race track and all these other colonial hangovers. It becomes not weird but obvious: the inevitability of the Poona Shrewsbury. The fact of these superior cookies is simply the fact of post-colonialism, is simply the fact of Camp. Of course you can find these crumbly, bland biscuits in both Stropshire and Pune.
Loving Shrewsbury biscuits isn’t an act of colonial nostalgia, really, I don’t think, like all those fake gymkhanas in London or whatever. It’s more like a kind of wonderment at the endurance of these relics, the way one marvels at the old redwoods with a tunnel cut inside so that babes in cone bras could roll through in a convertible, brushing their fingers against the exposed wood. You mourn the violence, but also you feel it, unmistakable: wonder.
And on a personal note, one more thing about my favorite biscuit: I taught my kids letters from the stamp around each shortbread: “find K!” “find Y!” “count Es!” I’d love them for that alone.
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P.S. Thank you so much for reading this inaugural entry. Would you subscribe and share with someone you think might like this?
P.P.S. I will post monthly! See you in January!
P.P.P.S. I have a list prepped but Pune people, please suggest snax!
P.P.P.P.S. Even in other blogs I’ve kept and as a journalist and academic I have found selecting and posting images to be a total bear. So I have just decided… not to. If you want to see a picture of a Shrewsbury biscuit you can either read this other thing I wrote or google it or better yet just buy some yourself.
P.P.P.P.P.S. Also this is not fact-checked or immaculately researched or whatever so as we used to say “don’t @ me”: Snax and the City is loose, first-thought best-thought writing and I think that’s actually for the best.