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.
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”.
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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