Henry Wills Bakery, Salem – a childhood memory
(Image source: The Hindu)
Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A-Indian_bank-_manikoondu_building.jpg
The ground floor of this iconic clock tower building was home to Henry Wills Bakery. (I don’t quite recollect seeing a signboard in the building. Maybe, they were so well known that they didn’t need one. Or, maybe, the signboard was too high for the little me to get a glimpse of it.) It was in a strategic location at the intersection of arterial shopping streets and close to the bus stand. Every time you passed by the intersection, you’d be greeted by the smell of fresh baked cakes and bread.
It was a tiny bakery… there were like two or three steps leading to the bakery which, by the way, that was all the space there was for the customers to stand in the store. It felt as if the store overflowed into the streets.
There was a charm to this place that altered the pulse of the intersection. The combination of the clock tower, an old building and the waft of sweetness in the air would fade out the hustle and bustle of the street for those few minutes you were in its vicinity.
I remember the huge glass jars on the top racks of the shelves filled with biscuits of many kinds – my favorites were the round salt butter biscuits, the square sweet butter biscuits and the animal crackers. There was variant on the salt butter with some herbs and spices added. It wasn’t my favorite, but I remember sampling it.
They had this fragrant soft white cake (perhaps vanilla, i never knew something called vanilla existed in those days) with a white icing and a squiggle of red jelly/jam in the center. The fragrant combination of that jam and the icing is etched in memory and I haven’t found anything that matches it yet. They also had this spherical cake dunked in thick icing that was painted in many colors. I don’t recollect what they used to call it back then; they are called apple cakes today. I suppose they make them from cake crumbs, but they definitely tasted delicious. Thank God, you can still find apple cakes at Sweet Chariot.
There was this fascinating ‘ornament’ in the bakery – a fancy long bread they used to call french loaf/french bread. All we knew back then was regular sliced bread. I think mom did buy it once, and I’ll tell you, we weren’t happy, as it was not sweet to start with, and, it was hard and dry unlike any bread we tasted before. Bread, back then, meant soft and sweet, and anything that wasn’t, was labelled stale.
There used to be an ice cream parlor very close to the same junction-Central Ice Cream was the name I suppose, where mom would take me after my trips to the Dentist Dr. Paulose. The glass ice cream cups and the square steel spoons and the wafer on top of the scoop – that was my introduction to ice cream ‘fine dining’. My favorite used to be the pistachio ice cream (pista ice cream as we called it).
The bakery, the ice cream parlor and the general store where you could pick up chocolates…all this made it a sweet junction. What more could I ask for.Henry Wills Bakery was in that iconic building for a very long time. Later, they moved to a place close by, and, eventually closed down. The identity of the bakery was associated with the clock tower, and its absence left a huge hole in the intersection.