Memories of Foreign Food

I got a great care package from John today (THANKS JOHN!!!), and it made me realize that sometimes eating (or contemplating eating) something from miles away can remind you of another place, also miles away.

Proustianically (Proustfully? Proustically?), the stage was set for this memorific realization by a cookie, or biscuit.

After my delight with the easy peasy lemon slice that I made with my cousin last week, I decided to solicit chowhounders' simple and tasty dessert recipes (listen to me, "simple but tasty", I sound like one of those awful "open two cans of mushroom soup" recipes). As part of my request, I posted the recipe for lemon slice, which included crushed Marie biscuits.

This was one of the replies:

Mingerspice, where are you located? I've only seen Marie biscuits in South Africa. I'm sure most chowhounders don't know what these are.

The thing is, I too grew up with Marie biscuits, and I associate them with my childhood in Malaysia and Singapore (although I was aware they were available in England as well).


photo from A Nice Cup of Tea And A Sit Down

Marie biscuits were quite a treat - I used to dip them in hot milo and, quality biscuits that they were, they then had the perfect texture - not so soft as to fall apart, but soft enough to melt the moment you took a bite. I had thought that, like most "luxury" confections I had growing up, they came from England. This assumption was true for such brands as Cadbury and the Marks & Spencers sweets (that's "candy" in American).

It turns out I was only partly right.

Marie biscuits - a brief history

I found a note on this geocities webpage about Marie biscuits' history, taken from another website - Tienda.com, a Spanish food retailer (I note the geocities webpage refers to the Marie biscuit in its preamble as a "cookie", using American English):

A vendor of foods from Spain relates this history of "the Queen of all Cookies":
"In 1875, the Grand Duchess Maria of Russia married the Duke of Edinburgh in a festive wedding, which caught Europe's fancy. To celebrate the occasion, a small English bakery in England created a sweet new cookie with Maria stamped on the top. Its popularity spread throughout Europe. Most of all, in Spain it became the nation's favorite cookie -- 40% of all cookies sold in the country.
Marias were first produced in large quantities in Spain around the turn of the 20th Century, but it was not until the Civil War that they became an integral part of the national culture. The long harsh years of the war plunged Spain deep into poverty, turning even a simple loaf of bread into a luxury. When the war ended in 1939, the nation's top priority was for every Spaniard to have enough bread. The wheat harvests were so plentiful that the bakers turned out huge number of cartons of Marias to consume the surplus. In those days, every cafe had a plate of Marias on the counter -- a happy sign of Spain's recovery."

There's a food history drenched in blood for you - created for the nobility of two European colonial powers, and then apparently a sign of celebration after the triumph of Franco (!).

I've seen them in the U.S. as well, in Ranch and/or other Asian groceries. Another reply to my post on chowhound noted that the poster had seen them "outside every Bodega", which would make sense given its hybrid English/Russian/Spanish heritage and history (ah, the fruits of colonialism). I wonder if they're available in the Russian food shops I've seen around the Bay Area.

All this is in aid of me noticing that a food doesn't have to actually be from a country to remind you of that country. Which leads me to Ritter Sport.

Ich bin ein Ritter SPORT fan!


Yes, they are made in Germany!

I've never seen Ritter Sport anywhere except California. Specifically, I first noticed them for sale at the Milk Pail market in Mountain View (a fabulous place to shop for food, btw). In fact, I don't recall encountering German food products in general anywhere except the U.S. Perhaps the Commonwealth countries (where I've spent most of my time) are still smarting from World War II and harbor a residual anti-German bias.

Whatever the reason for their absence in other parts of the world, I've come to strongly associate Ritter Sport chocolate with California. The characteristic square wrapper; that gratuitously masculine "SPORT" font (the irony of calling a chocolate bar "SPORT" is an endless source of amusement for me); and its surprising heft (it's much thicker than most other chocolate bars, certain Cadbury bars excepted). It's all Californian to me. As I've heard Ella croon - these foolish things remind me of you.

But when was your first time?

I don't remember the first time I ate Ritter, but I do remember back when I was living in Palo Alto, going to Milk Pail for some vegetable I needed for a meal I was making (possibly celery - I never have celery when I need it, or maybe it was bread?), quite annoyed at myself, then impulse-buying a Ritter bar, and eating the whole thing on the drive home (not a very long drive). Actually, perhaps I was going to Brooke's house for a party - as fun as those are, interacting with new people can cause anxiety and chocolate-eating. Or maybe I was driving home after work and was stressed out. Wow, this might not be a very pleasant memory after all. Well, the chocolate made it all better. Yes.

Side/Endnote: To all the amateur psychoanalysts reading this, does Ritter's obvious butchness (thick, square, SPORT-y, German) mean that I think of California as male? And does its patent campiness (thick, square, SPORT-y, German) mean that I think of California as a leather queen? Or perhaps the square shape is an active avoidance of male signals, since most chocolate bars are, well, long bars. After WWII, maybe these German chocolatiers didn't want to make phallic candy that would signify aggression? What would Freud say? What would Proust say? What would Butler say?

Wow, this has really turned out to be two posts in one (I spent way longer on Marie biscuits than I'd anticipated, but as I did research on them they turned out to be a bit more interesting than I thought they were, and I felt I had to share). Thanks for getting to the end!

Can I keep up the neologisms? Read more...