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Food

Learning My Favorite Childhood Cookie's Secret Ingredient Destroyed Me

And it's a shame, because Peek Freans' Shortcake Biscuits were the best in the world.
Photograph via Peek Freans

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I must have been eight years old the first time I had anything resembling an ethical quandary around food.

The image is crystalline in my head: My mother and I were standing in the cookie aisle of Foodtown in Edison, New Jersey in 2000, gathering groceries. For some reason, that day was the first time we’d bothered to inspect the ingredient list of a cookie we’d been eating for years, UK company Peek Freans’ Shortcake Biscuits. They were rectangular and small, the size of a Smurf’s credit card, compact with butter and sugar. They’d been part of my dietary rotation since what felt like birth.

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That day gave us a rude awakening. My mother peered at back of the cookie box and recoiled with such visceral disgust I wondered if she’d seen a rotting carcass.

“Beef fat shortening,” she muttered.

I imagine I reacted the same way most former carnivores did when they saw the 2008 documentary Food, Inc.—that is, with such utter revulsion that they vowed to excise meat entirely from their diets. Well, folks, this moment was my Food, Inc.

From that point on, my mother and I vowed never again to bring Peek Freans Shortcake into our house. It was a matter of principle: How could we possibly justify putting something so gross-sounding inside our bodies? Beef fat shortening… in a cookie? Did feeding this to her son constitute child endangerment?

What was beef fat shortening, anyway? I didn’t know, but I was an imaginative child, so my mind ran wild with pretend-renderings of what beef fat shortening looked like. It probably resembled Vaseline, my child-mind decided, and I couldn’t quite make peace with the image of petroleum jelly floating around in my biscuit.

It was a painful separation. In Peek Freans' Shortcake, my family and I had found the perfect cookie for dunking in tea, a much more difficult endeavor than you may imagine. Tea was my Bengali family’s lifeblood; we’d have it once in the morning just after we woke up and again in the afternoon, bridging the space between meals.

But Darjeeling tea with 2-percent milk is no fun on its own. It requires a solid. It requires a cookie.

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It’s too bad that the vast majority of cookies collapse easily in tea. They aren't engineered with immigrant families like ours in mind. Most cookies forced us to make trade-offs between flavor and (literal) structural integrity. We needed a cookie that was constitutionally sound enough to survive that forced submersion.

Digestive biscuits, bland and beige, are easy victims. They break so hastily that they travel to the bottom of your cup, forcing you to scoop them out with a spoon. Oreos somehow taste even better when they have some moisture, but dunking one in your tea is a recipe for disaster; it will both muddy your tea and leave a pile of soot in your cup. Who wants to drink chocolate wafer-ash?

Peek Freans' Shortcake was the only cookie that met my family's narrow, hyper-specific parameters for a tea cookie. If we’re talking texture, it wasn’t so brittle that it would disintegrate before your eyes upon contact with tea. Its flavor was rich, but nondescript enough not to pollute the tea. The perfect median.

Once my mother and I had made the discovery of its beef fat shortening, though, we were done. The cookies have since been discontinued in the States for years now, though I’ve been unable to confirm exactly for how long. When I reached out for comment to Peek Freans' American distributor, Mondelez, the company was unable to confirm when Peek Freans was discontinued within the United States. The official Peek Freans website is no help; it's on its last limbs, and dead links abound.

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There is, shockingly, little discussion of the cookies' beef fat shortening online. Beyond some sites that list beef fat shortening among the cookie's ingredients, the most I've been able to find is a forum discussion, dating back to 2004, on Veggieboards, a site where vegetarians and vegans convene. A few users express this same horror that my mother and I once did. “BEWARE of Peak [sic] Freans Shortbread,” the thread title warns.

Peak Freans-branded cookies are still sold in Canada and Pakistan, and the Shortcake biscuits are also readily available for online purchase if you're in the States. By evidence of the Shortcake's Canadian ingredient list, Peek Freans has eliminated beef fat shortening from the calculus. (Mondelez has declined to provide further comment regarding this change. I'm quite confused.)

The price point on Amazon—nearly $14 for a 10.6-ounce box!—is too high to justify; I’m no spendthrift. But I’d be lying if I told you I haven’t thought about buying it. Nostalgia is a nasty virus, making you want to spend money you don’t have.

I haven’t eaten one since that day 18 years ago, which you may believe disqualifies me from penning anything resembling an endorsement of these cookies. Nonsense. My memory of this cookie has swelled so furiously that I can recommend it without hesitation to anyone who doesn’t live on a writer’s budget. Besides, as you grow older, I’ve realized you are forced to reckon with all the garbage you put in your body from which you derive pleasure. Pick your poison. If I could afford it, my poison would be this cookie that may or may not have beef fat shortening.

In the meantime, I have subsisted by trying to dunk other shortcake-adjacent cookies in my tea. These are exercises in futility. Take Walker’s Shortbread. It tastes just fine. But it sure as shit can’t survive tea.

Why, I tried having it with my tea mere days ago. And there it was: suspended in the drink for mere seconds before it sank like a lifejacket rapidly losing air, with no beef fat shortening to keep it afloat.