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Saturday, April 22, 2017

EGGS KEJRIWAL-EGGS MAY BE ESCAPING THE VEG/NON-VEG DIVIDE,EMERGING AS A MARKET READY TO BE CRACKED OPEN-AN ARTICLE BY VIKRAM DOCTOR

By Vikram Doctor, ET Bureau Updated: Apr 22, 2017, 01.24 AM IST
MUMBAI:In 2012, ET published an article about Kejriwal. This was not the Aam Aadmi Party leader, though he was riding high in the news at that time. It was about a snack of eggs and cheese on toast and topped with green chillies that had long been served at Mumbai’s Willingdon Club, named after the member Devi Prasad Kejriwal who had come up with the combination and ordered it enough to make it a menu fixture. 

Eggs Kejriwal was little known outside pockets of South Mumbai then. But in the five years since, this has changed. Kejriwal the politician might be in the doldrums at the moment, but Kejriwal the egg dish has, rather improbably, gone global. 

Restaurants like Dishoom in London and Paowalla in New York have put it on their menus. “It’s very popular. We sell around 100 every day across all our branches,” says Shamil Thakrar, one of the founders of Dishoom. 

For those who knew Eggs Kejriwal, this sudden success is rather surreal, but welcome. Because more than just the dish itself, it is bringing attention to the range of excellent, but often overlooked Indian egg dishes.

Almost every new café opening in Mumbai now seems to put it on its menu. The Soda Bottle Opener Wala chain is taking it across India. Eggs Kejriwal has been sighted on menus in places as far apart as San Francisco and Bali. Last year, the New York Times listed it among its  top 10 dishes of the year and recently ran another story by writer Tejal Rao who extolled it as “a reliable fix for hangovers, solid enough to pass for breakfast but compact enough to snack on between meals”. 

The Bombay Canteen's eggs Kejriwal is faithful to the original recipe.
Eggs Kejriwal at The Bombay Canteen.Eggs Kejriwal at The Bombay Canteen.Devi Prasad Kejriwal is frequently recalled in Mumbai’s food circles. The eggs Kejriwal is named after the Marwari businessman, who had a penchant for eggs, forbidden to him as he belonged to a staunchly vegetarian family. The story goes that Kejriwal defiantly feasted on eggs at The Willingdon Sports Club in Tardeo, of which he was a member. Kejriwal would customise his regular order of fried eggs on toast with green chillies and cheese. The club reportedly honoured his devotion to the dish by adding it to its menu)


For those who knew Eggs Kejriwal, this sudden success is rather surreal, but welcome. Because more than just the dish itself, it is bringing attention to the range of excellent, but often overlooked Indian egg dishes. Rao noted some of the Mumbai variations: “hard-boiled curries and frankies, wrestler’s omelets and masala scrambles”. 

Roads & Kingdoms, a popular international website for travel writing, recently featured Udaipur’s Jay Kumar Valecha who, in a state of devout vegetarians and fervent meat-eaters, has created a popular business called The Egg World. 

AMBIGUOUS POSITION IN INDIAN KITCHENS 

Valecha sells unique creations like boiled egg bhurji, tandoori omelettes and egg bunch (boiled and scrambled egg bhurji wrapped in fried eggs). Ahura, a restaurant on the Mumbai-Gujarat highway famous for Parsi egg dishes like salli pe eedu (eggs on wafers) has now opened a branch on the Mumbai-Pune expressway that seems to be doing brisk business. 

Mc’Donald’s in India is best known for items such as Chicken Maharaja Mac and McAloo Tikkis, but Kedar Teny, director (marketing & digital), McDonald’s India (West & South), says eggs are their second fastest growing protein in India. That’s why, he says, they “have been consistently increasing the egg offerings to our customers. We launched the Egg McMuffin for breakfast in 2004, followed by the Egg Burger, Egg wrap and now the Masala Egg Bhurji”. 


Eggs have always had an ambiguous position in Indian kitchens. Vegetarians abroad usually eat them, but strict Indian vegetarians don’t. Even in families where some members eat them, they are still not cooked at home out of deference to the older members, or Brahmin cooks, who shun them totally. (This is why Debi Prasad Kejriwal, a member of the Willingdon, created the dish to eat outside home.) If Mumbai has created the Kejriwal, it also has a considerable industry making eggless cakes and swees.There are stories of apartment buildings in Gujarat where the garbage of residents is checked for tell-tale egg shells. In 2004, in the case of Om Prakash vs. UP, the Supreme Court upheld the total ban on sale of eggs in the pilgrimage destinations of Haridwar, Rishikesh and Muni ki Reti on account of the “geographical situation and peculiar culture of the three towns”. 

But Indian non-vegetarians too seem oddly unenthusiastic about eggs. They eat them, of course, but the attitude seems to be that if meat can be eaten then meat is what is wanted, and eggs are a poor substitute. Except at breakfast, most non-vegetarians will rarely opt for purely egg dishes, which is why restaurants tend not to feature them much. And people expect egg dishes to be cheap, so there’s little profit incentive for restaurants to offer them. 


SENSE OF UNCERTAINTY 

This uncertainty is reflected in Indian cookbooks which are often unsure where to put egg recipes. They don’t seem to fit with vegetable dishes, but are overshadowed by meat dishes. Some create a poultry category where a few egg dishes appear after many chicken recipes. Some put them with fish. It is telling perhaps that, apart from the famously egg-loving Parsis, the few books on cooking in India that really give space to eggs were from military men. RAP Hare’s Tasty Dishes of India which was put together when he left India in 1947 from the recipes of his Indian cook Khoda Buksh has more than 20, starting with curried omelettes. Colonel Kenney-Herbert’s Culinary Jottings from Madras has detailed instructions on cooking omelettes, including out in the field, and many other egg dishes. 

The fact that both were British military men is probably not unconnected with their enthusiasm for eggs — it means they would have had access to them. Easy availability of eggs in India is a relatively modern development. Chickens originated in India, but their domestication for meat and eggs happened largely in other parts of the world. Ancient Indians seem to have been prejudiced against chickens, perhaps because their scavenging habits made them seem impure. 

Chitrita Banerji, in Life and Food in Bengal, notes that duck eggs were acceptable to Bengali Hindus. As for chickens, “being a heathen bird, the prohibition extended to its eggs”. Goan historian Fatima da Silva Gracias has recently published a fascinating glossary to Goan ingredients in which she notes that eggs were never cheap. In the days before intensive egg farms, they came from country hens which were unpredictable, and whose eggs were in particular demand as invalid food. 

The point is that it took time for poultry keeping to overcome prejudices and grow to the point where eggs were easily, and cheaply available. And consumption grew with it, but not openly. A study on Indian havelis, for example, notes that eggs were formally banned from their kitchens, but were sometimes allowed in by being noted, in the books of accounts, as ‘white potatoes’. Orthodox matriarchs gave in to the demands of daughters-in-law to allow eggs as a source of protein for the children of the house — but cooked privately on hotplates or outside stoves, not in the main kitchen. 

SAFE-TO-EAT SNACK 

Egg consumption in India has thrived not in homes or formal restaurants but in a vast, but less visible sphere of clubs, hostel canteens (which have made Maggi noodles with eggs the main food of college students), all-day dhabas and cafes run by communities like Iranis and Chelia Muslims, food courts and fastfood restaurants. Eggs are the mainstay of street food, sold boiled and ready to peel for a safe-to-eat snack, scrambled into bhurjis, or flipped into omelettes. It may not be the sort of street food that is mythologised, but it is what people really eat. And this essential familiarity may be what is slowly driving the increasing visibility of Indian egg dishes, even in formal restaurants. “People are comfortable ordering eggs,” says Dishoom’s Thakrar. They might be uncertain with less familiar dishes, but the attitude seems to be  that, no matter what you add to them, eggs are eggs. 

One New York Times reader noted that the Kejriwal is essentially a slightly tweaked version of the Egg McMuffin, one of the most iconic dishes from the Golden Arches. Another factor is that restaurants are moving into the space where eggs really rule. “Breakfast has become really big for us,” says Thakrar. Apart from Kejriwals, they also do brisk business with Bombay omelettes, Akuri (Parsi scrambled eggs), Keema pe eedu (eggs  and mince) and bacon and egg naan rolls. Places that only opened for lunch or dinner are now realising the value in morning meals. Eggs may finally be escaping India’s vegetarian/non-vegetarian divide, emerging as a market ready to be cracked open. 


Read more at:
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/58306853.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

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