Fans of fen.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Flaky, light, and crisp, fen is a kind of—shall we say—biskut?

In truth, it is closer to a puff pastry, made up of many fragile layers, each ready to collapse under even the slightest pressure of the finger.

Fen may be brittle, but it is among Delhi’s most democratic bakery offerings. It is affordable to many. A classic companion to morning tea, it now sells for about ten rupees for two. Not long ago, it was five. At the turn of the century, it could be had for a single rupee.

The snack is traditionally the stuff of mornings. At dawn, fens begin to arrive at the city’s roadside tea stalls, delivered daily by distributors on bikes, who source them from “factories”—a generic term for small-scale bakeries on the city’s fringes that mass-produce items like fen and cream rolls. That said, many neighbourhood bakeries in Old Delhi still make their own.

One morning, a rickshaw puller near Kashmere Gate is at a tea stall for a breakfast of fen and chai, perched on his rickshaw’s passenger seat, legs crossed leisurely. Each time, before taking a bite, he dips the fen into the tea, letting it soften just enough. This, of course, is the safest way to eat the thing. A dry fen can be wildly unpredictable. One bite, and it begins to fall apart, shards cascading onto your lap. Tasleema, a librarian in central Delhi, eats two fens every morning, but never outside her home. “The flakes fall like monsoon rain,” she says, “and people might think I have no manners.”

Some Delhiwale—perhaps those freshly returned from Paris—might like to liken the fen to the croissant. That holds only up to a point. A croissant is soft within, buttery and yielding. Fen, by contrast, is crisp through and through. And while a croissant leans sweet, fen is unapologetically salty.

But what does fen mean? It is not “fan,” despite the echo. Some say it looks like a fan—really?! The word “fen” does resemble, phonetically, with the word “firni,” the rice pudding, but the resemblance ends there. Ask bakers, sellers, or morning regulars, and nobody is able to give any gyan on the meaning of the name. Elsewhere, the fen, or a version of it, answers to another name: khari, especially in the Parsi bakeries of Mumbai. That term, at least, translates neatly and honestly to “salty.”

In Delhi, maybe the fen needs no translation. It is simply a roadside ritual of the morning, paired with chai, readying the body and senses for the hard day ahead.