Sweet staff

[muckefuck]

While at Patel Brothers Friday night, I picked up some cookies from Mughal Bakery. Normally, I like to by them in the store itself, since it's around the corner only and that way you're guaranteed of freshness, but they tend to close early. I wanted something to go with my tea, but they didn't have any chand cookies, so I settled for the nan khatie.

The second element in this name has always been a mystery to me. I was pronouncing it khatee until I tried to look it up and found nothing with that spelling. So I Googled around until I discovered that the correct spelling was नान खटाई naan khaTaaee--the "tie" ending hear pronounced as in English "necktie", not English "Katie". For खटाई, Shabdkosh.com gives two translations "acid" and "jumble", both of which seem rather odd. There's nothing sour about the taste of the biscuits, but perhaps there was a souring agent involved in the preparation of the dough nevertheless? As for "jumble", there's a mix of spices, but by Indian standard not that many. Another dictionary gave the definition "Citrus aurantium"; again, there's not a pronounced bitter orange taste to them, but could the zest be an important enough ingredient to bestow the name?

I still wasn't satisfied with these answers and so turned to the Platts dictionary, where I bumbled onto خطائي <ḵẖat̤āʼī "of or belonging to Cathay". A light went on; "Cathayan bread" for a fancy sweet biscuit sounded much more plausible than my other options (cf. German Russisch Brot, a kind of alphabet cookie). Later, I found confirmation under the entry for nān, i.e. "nān-ḵẖat̤āʼī, s.f. A kind of sweetmeat". So there you go.

In the midst of my researches, I tried dunking a nān-xat̤āʼī into the pu-erh monshu had prepared and wasn't thrilled with the results. So while I was at Pars Grocery yesterday looking for orange blossom water (the only bottle we could find locally, at La Única, was in the botánica section and had "FOR EXTERNAL USE" prominently on the label), I got me some cardamom-flavoured Ceylon tea and it's a perfect marriage.

The orange blossom water, incidentally, was for the pan de muertos recipe from Bombon that e. thoughtfully dug out for us. Because monshu is a prince among men, he promised me that if I delivered it to him, he would bake us pan de muertos for All Saints and this morning that's just what he did. Hmm...perhaps I should have something else besides that to eat today? Couldn't hurt. Hmm, where is my Cathayan bread?

Comments

[oh-meow.livejournal.com]

We have biscuits called orange jumbles in the UK. They're not jumbled in taste (orange zest mainly), they're just irregular shapes. Maybe there's some connection

[oh-meow.livejournal.com]

They look like this http://home.planet.nl/~sar00143/pictures/DSC03659.JPG

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Doubtful. Those look nothing at all like the nan khatai from Mughal Bakery, which are even round biscuits of decent thickness. In appearance and consistency, they're much like shortbread.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

so did you bump into princeofcairo there?

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

So does monshu have any comments on the recipe? I've been thinking of trying it out (I think I still have the one that was published in the Sun-Times, probably the same one e. had) since we were stinted of our Day of the Dead bread this year by Bombon having burned down. (Anybody know when they're re-opening, btw?).

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

He also called it "very easy" (but that should be taken in the context of him calling mole "not hard") and complained that the dough was a bit sticky and hard to work with. No arguing with the results, however!