"Growing up in Chennai, I felt like I could tell time based on when hot drinks were served in our house. The city is famed for its coffee, blended with chicory root and poured into glasses in dramatic foot-long streams, but ours was a tea household. My parents' Guzzini mugs would come out promptly at 6:30 a.m. and once more at 4 p.m., the time I, with my mandated mug of milk, looked forward to most of all because it meant an accompanying packet of shortbread wasn't far away."
"We'd sit together with our basset hound, Droopy, in the orange-tiled backyard, my grandmother too, when she was still alive, drinking our drinks, dunking our biscuits, discussing what dinner might be (the dog's standing request was chicken gizzards). The combination of spiced milky tea and cookies will always be the taste of home to me. These tea-laced sandwich cookies capture that memory precisely."
"Chai is a distinctly Northern Indian term. In Southern India, and particularly in Tamil Nadu, where I'm from, we often call it masala tea. While the mixture of spices used varies among regions, almost every version of masala tea includes ginger and cardamom. BAKER'S NOTE: It's best to use finely ground tea from a tea bag here because of how seamlessly it dissolves into the dough."
Growing up in Chennai, family hot-drink rituals marked daily time with morning and afternoon servings of spiced milky tea. Coffee is famed in the city, but the household favored masala tea served in Guzzini mugs at 6:30 a.m. and 4 p.m., accompanied by shortbread. The family sat in an orange-tiled backyard with a basset hound and grandmother, drinking and dunking biscuits. Masala tea, the Southern term for chai in Tamil Nadu, typically includes ginger and cardamom though spice blends vary. For baking, finely ground tea from a tea bag blends best, or crush whole leaves before adding to melted butter.
Read at Epicurious
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