Adieu, mawa cakes

Adieu, mawa cakes
The 100-year-old landmark Irani café, B. Merwan and Company at Grant Road will down its shutters on March 31, 2014. "We are exhausted now. We cannot handle running it anymore,” Sarosh Irani, third generation owner along with his cousin Bomi, admitted to The Times of India (TOI) on January 12, 2014.

Iconic bakery B. Merwan & Co will soon close down Photos: Simin Patel

Many Irani restaurants have closed down due to poor patronage, with the profile of clients having changed in recent years. However, this is not the case with Merwan. With its prime location outside the busy Grant Road railway station, it has loyal customers coming in from 5.30 a.m. for tea, brun maska and of, course, the best loved offering, mawa cakes. "We are here from 3 a.m.,” Irani told TOI. "That is when the bakers start their work. The cakes and everything else is kept ready for when we open at 5.30 a.m.” The hectic schedule and stress of running the place, along with the fact that the next generation does not want to take over the business, had made the family decide to call it a day, reports TOI. "The fourth generation is all daughters, and they are busy with their own lives and work. One is busy with her post-production career, another is a dentist in Australia,” Irani revealed.
When asked what will come up in its place, Irani told TOI: "It depends on what the developer decides.”
City historian Deepak Rao, an avid fan of Irani cafes in the city, called Merwan’s an "iconic place… Even today, whenever anyone is in the (Grant Road) area, or visiting Bombay, people tell him ‘Merwan sé cake léké aao’ (bring cakes from Merwan).” He elaborated to Mid Day (January 9, 2014) that the chairs in the café made of Czechoslovakian wood, the marble-topped tables from Italy and signboard with the familiar lettering are as old as the café. With Grant Road being one of the oldest railway stations in the city, the eatery has served as a popular haunt for taxi drivers, students and office-goers alike.
Often all the mawa cakes are over by 7 a.m. Irani showed TOI a stack of papers with orders for cakes. "These are for tomorrow. Today we are all sold out.”
Interestingly, the "Bombay cupcake” travels all the way to London for the delectation of persons like celebrity chef Cyrus Toddywala who told Mint on January 18, 2014 that "the B. Merwan family bakes the best mawa cakes ever. In fact, we have three mini ones in our freezer right now.” Convinced that the delicacy was a Merwan brainchild, Todiwala put forward this theory to Mint: "In the early 1900s, our milk was not pasteurized, neither was refrigeration available. Milk had to be boiled over and over again to stop it from going off in our heat and humidity. This boiling down created an automatic mawa and by the end of the day they would have a lot of it. The Irani owner experimented with it by adding it to a cake and created one of the most significant tea-time cakes Bombay has ever known.”
Mint mentions yet another insight provided by Dr Kurush Dalal of Katy’s Kitchen. The archeologist-cum-caterer who is following in his late mother’s footsteps feels that the mawa cake is an adaptation of the Zoroastrian kumas. "The Irani refugees were not very educated but knew how to bake. They modified their traditional kumas with local ingredients — khoya (milk solids) and cardamom — to make mawa cake.”
Whatever be the cake’s origins, according to Mint its epitaph is far from being written even with B. Merwan closing its doors on March 31. "The mawa cake will most likely survive, because it is not often that the whiff of cake has the power to evoke memories of a lost time, that a cake is so much a piece of history.”