Kamarkat

I am a sucker for sweets. We always used to salivate at the thought of Dad coming back Home - with his goodie bag - especially the Swiss chocolates - the big bars with lots of nuts inside.....having grown up on Nutrine -the dark green toffee and then the Maha Lacto ( yellow wrapper) you could just not stop with one - the Swiss ones were like water to a desert rat.

Well now there are always the dairy milk fruit & nut, toblerone bars and ferro rocher......If you are already salivating - wait this blog is not about these but on its poorer desi cousin - caramellised jaggery and sugar and just a hint of coconut - Friends, South Indians and Country people, lend me your senses.

The Kamarkat (ka-mar-cut and NOT to be pronounced like meer-kat), to my mind, cannot be defined for someone who has not tried it. This along with elantha vadai,then ( honey) mittai, javvu mittai, Kodal ( precursor to your fry's) and everlasting raw manga uppu molaga podi....... Was the menu of many a school gateside takeaway those days. But this is for my fellow kamarkat lovers...

The professional ones that we got at the school shop were dark brown, wrapped in a transparent plastic paper so you could pick and choose the darkest,vilest brown turning to black. You could tell these were the tastiest and would last longest. And those were the days when you could produce a princely rupee and walk away with enough kamarkat to feed a kingdom.

I remember we had to time the purchase well. Because, the kamarkat would last a really long while and you simply could not get caught with a sweet in your mouth in class. So preparations would be to finish lunch in a jiffy, skip over to the shop shop and buy an armfull of kamarkat and run before the watchman/teacher caught you 'what-are-you-going-to-do-with-so-many-sweets-that-can-spoil-your-teeth- and- give-you-four-kinds-of-stomach-worms?!'. You don't want to be answering those kind of questions, do you?

Anyways, this is not so much about them, as it is about sinking your teeth into that gooey 'goli', and letting the slow effusion of sweet-yet-a-little-bitter jaggery take over. It kind of lets the juice out - gives you a high immediately - like as though u r on dope, sorry for the bad example, there is no perfect-er metaphor: it's like the kamarkat knows exactly when to release the juices, just like the stent lets out the drug to keep your artery unblocked!

The best treat was to be able to suck on it forever and a little more and then push around a few slivers of coconut in your mouth,when forever ended and so did the kamarkat. Ah! The pleasure of that!

But then, the kamarkat died. After a while, they simply stopped making it anymore. Which is when you tried to make do with the 'poornam' used to make the sweet kozhukattai, but no siree, we're just not there at all!

It's not as rock solid as the 'pro' ones we could buy off the push carts, 'Naadar kadais' or oddly, convent school TUCK shops.....but surprise surprise have found a variant of this in singapore - but the taste borders on kamarkat and alwa.....

Need to go to vyasarpadi to replenish the stock next time I am in india.....