I arrived a few days ago from Turkey. I was in Izmir, where I attended a conference on Design and Transience (I must say that in English it sounds much better). At the conference, also of a transitory nature, I spoke, among other things, about Virginia Woolf and charcoal (which, in reality, are made of graphite, and which have neither charcoal nor, as it seems to be called, lead pencils). imply, lead).
Charcoal pencils are also synonymous with back to school, a return that happened right after the conference, for everyone at home. For me, who decided to continue feeding my materialistic vein and start a doctorate in design history, for my husband, who, about to finish his own doctorate, returned to teaching after the holidays, and for our children, who returned to the school. And, in that warm breeze of the last days of summer that still floated inside the house, the smell of sun cream and the sea air began to mix, as they do every year, with the smell of cedar from the pencils, with the unmistakable smell of new erasers and with that chemical smell of printed ink on new books. All of these fragrances, with citrus notes of nostalgia but floral notes of anticipation, make up the fleeting scent of September. Also in this perfumed breeze are the Maria cookies, with their discreet aroma of vanilla, which on beach days you hide shredded socks at the bottom of the bag of towels, and which in September are made up and stored in packs of four, wrapped in real plastic. uniform, perfectly aligned inside the lunchboxes.
The Maria biscuit has been a part of Portuguese life for many decades. Many think that it is a Portuguese product. Her name is Maria, right? And aren’t there so many women named Maria in Portugal? And it is not manufactured by national companies? Who does not remember the tin in the kitchen of grandma’s house, half dented at the corners and rusty around the edges, full of Maria cookies and arrowroot cookies that, after living together in a hermetically sealed environment, already all tasted the same? Who has not spent their childhood dipping Maria cookies in a glass of warm milk, first very quickly so as not to break the cookie, then leaving it longer to soak, in an act of reckless and experimental transgression, until it crumbles into falling pieces? to the bottom of the glass and scratched his throat when the milk was drunk to the end? Who doesn’t remember eating half a dozen buttered Maria cookies, often with more butter than cookie? And who doesn’t remember the Portuguese biscuit tart, the coffee buttercream that softens stacked biscuits, or the salami, a foil-wrapped chocolate cannon filled with crunchy bits of Maria biscuit?
But no, the Maria biscuit is not Portuguese. And she has a design story worth telling.
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Source: Observadora
