Handmade Biscuits from a Nilgiri Tea Estate

About Chom Chom Pantry

Nobody ever opened a biscuit tin and found buttons and thought: yes, good, this is fine.

A proper British biscuit tin is, frankly, a civilisational achievement on par with the moon landing, though significantly more useful on a rainy Tuesday. Inside, you will find Bourbons, custard creams, shortbread, ginger biscuits, malted milks, and the Garibaldi — named, improbably, after a revolutionary general, which tells you everything you need to know about the British relationship with biscuits and history. Some of these will be old friends.

Others may require an introduction. All of them have been quietly doing their job for generations, asking for nothing more than a decent cup of tea and a level of respect usually reserved for minor royalty.

One does not rush a biscuit tin.

And Then There’s the Enid Blyton Problem

I grew up reading about picnic puddings, drop scones, ginger beer, and elderflower cordials. I watched Midsomer Murders — a show where the primary cause of death, besides “blunt force trauma by a prize-winning marrow,” is not having enough tea — and fell completely in love with the ceremony of it all. The charm. The wit. The sheer Britishness of proper biscuits with tea.

The kind of food that comes with story, with ritual, and a slight air of impropriety if you have too many.

This is the kind of food I love making. The kind that makes someone stop mid-conversation, look at what they’re holding, and say: where did you get this?

The Estate, the Steps, the Dogs

When I moved to this little tea estate in Kotagiri — part colonial-style Nilgiri bungalow, part Bengali warmth, entirely covered in tea bushes and speckled with fruit trees — I finally had the kitchen, the larder, and the unhurried mornings to do it properly.

Every morning, I take my tea and sit on the steps outside my French windows. Hills in the distance. Tea bushes rising in neat layered waves.

Two dogs pressed hopefully against my legs in the eternal, tail-wagging conviction that today might finally be the day they win the Biscuit Lottery. It rarely is. But it’s a good life.

Put the kettle on

The Lightly Sweet Gap

I have always preferred my sweet things subtle. Not the kind of sweetness that announces itself; the kind that lingers… a whiff of ginger, a nice smokiness of nolen gur, a shortbread that knows when to stop. India doesn’t make many things like that. The assumption seems to be that we want our sweetness bold, our biscuits sugary, our snacks scaled to a festival. Which is wonderful, genuinely — but it isn’t always what I want with a cup of coffee at 11.

I know this sounds like a very specific complaint, but when you’ve spent most of your life travelling the world for luxury magazines — interviewing chefs, tasting your way through Michelin kitchens and legendary cook-driven holes-in-the-wall, and developing what some might call snobby, but I call refined taste — you notice these things.

So I made a batch for myself. Then another. Then I really wanted more people to enjoy them. Bolstered by the entirely reasonable evidence that friends and family have always loved what I make, I started Chom Chom Pantry.

Biscuits made slowly, from ingredients with addresses.. Each named playfully, because life is entirely too short to be serious about your snacks.

This isn’t a hobby that got out of hand. It’s a lifetime of loving food, reading about it, travelling for it, making it for people I care about — and finally having the space and time to do it properly.

Welcome to Chom Chom Pantry. Where the biscuit tin is never empty.

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