Just One Food - Old School Biscuits

It was some time before Chinese New Year when my mom fell ill.  After not getting any better with western medication, she wanted to seek traditional medicine (which the generation before us strongly believes in by the way).

As we all know, herbal and traditional medicine practitioners are usually stationed in Chinese medicinal shops (some of which sell sundries too) and they're notorious for making "patients" wait for hours (especially those well-known ones).  So, while we were waiting there (for hours), I noticed these stuff hanging in front of me. With time to kill, I thought I'd take photos and write a blog post about them.

It's a trip down memory lane as these snacks are a blast from my past! ;)  They are old-school biscuits I used to or we all used to eat as kids.  

I remember these ones...some kind of salted biscuits (my favourite) though the ones I had used to be round.

And then there were these rectangular-shaped biscuits with cream inside...and we would be silly, happy kids with just white cream.  Of course, we now have lots of biscuits with all sorts of different coloured and flavoured cream fillings.

Ok, these biscuits are still common and available to this day.  Don't know what you call them in English but we refer to them as ear biscuits (direct and literal translation from Cantonese)...salty and crunchy.

These are also commonly found till today....kuih bangkit (which we see more often during Chinese New Year).  These melt-in-your-mouth cookies are made from tapioca flour, eggs, sugar and coconut milk.

These are pineapple jam biscuits which are quite different from the pineapple cookies we have now.  These ones, the pineapple jam is sandwiched between the cookies.  As for the fish shaped biscuits, I think I remember them coming in all sorts of shapes of different types of animals.

These long stick-shaped biscuits were eaten as they were then but they now come with chocolate dips and what not.  Those round ones next to it, I have no recollection of them.

Ah, these chocolate wafers were the real deal then.  Now we have so many copycat versions and brands.

But probably the most nostalgic old-school biscuits of all are these iced gem biscuits...colourful little biscuits with a squirt of icing sugar on top.  They certainly bring back fond childhood memories....and everyone seems to have their own way of eating this.  Some would bite off the icing sugar first and eat the biscuit later and for some it would be the other way round.  Little girls would probably arrange and eat them by their colours...haha! ;D

And all these biscuits, sold in old-school provision shops, were stored in iconic metal tins (similar to the one above) except the tins have a see-through 'window' in the front for us to see the type of biscuits in each tin. My spouse's family home in Ipoh still keep these tins to store their fried prawn crackers every Chinese New Year.  

These small provision shops are a dying trade now that we have large supermarkets.  I wonder if we can still find biscuits sold this way...maybe in smaller towns?  The only time I've come across these types of old school biscuits sold are at "pasar malams" (night markets)...but the difference is you find them stored in plastic containers now instead...so not cool! :p

Kids these days probably won't even give these biscuits another look....and who can blame them with the types and varieties available to them now.  Some probably haven't even seen such biscuits.  Sadly, it's part of our snack heritage that's fast disappearing from the childhood of future generations....and that's a shame really! :'(

So, which old school biscuits stir up fond memories for you? ;)