FOOD SPECIAL..... A khichdi of palates

A khichdi of palates

The government's  proposal to recognise khichdi as India's National Dish had created a surprising controversy. But even more surprising is the fact that, with apparently no controversy, Egypt accepted a variant of khichdi as its de facto National Dish.

Koshari as it's called, doesn't immediately look like khichdi. The rice is mixed with pasta, then lentils and a spicy tomato sauce and finally covered with crisp fried onions. With khichdi everything cooks together to one harmonious whole, but koshari is assembled from separately cooked ingredients which play off each other, rather like bhel puri.

But take a bite and the re semblance is clear. Koshari delivers the same kick of carbohydrate crammed bliss, that deep sense of stomachfilling satisfaction you get with khichdi. Its base is also the essential combination of grain and pulse, which makes it closer to desi khichdi than British kedgeree, where smoked fish and eggs pro vide the protein rather than pulses.

Kedgeree's descent from khichdi can be traced to the early 19th century. The first references to it in British cookbooks are close to regular khichdi, but writers like Eliza Acton, in her Modern Cookery for Private Families (1845) felt that more was needed, and started adding fish. Kedgeree became a British breakfast dish, made of ingredients assembled rather than cooked together.

Koshari's genesis is more recent. The American food writer John Thorne has traced khichdi's journeys in an essay in his book Pot on the Fire and quotes Claudia Roden, the great Middle Eastern food expert on how she had never heard of it when she left Cairo in 1952, yet 30 years later found it everywhere.

Everyone Thorne checked with agreed that koshari originated with the British Indian Army which had t roops in Egypt during World War II: “the dish possibly picked up by local cooks hired to work in the mess hall of some Indian regiment stationed in Cairo.“ Another location might have been the Suez Canal zone, which always had Indians passing through -and disembarking, rather desperately, to eat tastier food than was available on British ships.

Khichdi's combination of a cheap, yet nutritionally balanced and very satisfying meal obviously caught on with regular Egyptians. The odd use of pasta was probably to eke out rice with even cheaper wheat-based pasta, though it's worth noting that E P Veerasawmy's cookbook Indian Cooking (1936) has a recipe for `Rice and Spaghetti (Bhat aur Savia)' so the combination was not unknown.

Khichdi also travelled with Baghdadi Jews. During the British Raj they came to cities like Bombay, where they encountered khichdi and took it back to Baghdad. In the kosher system that prohibited mixing dairy and meat, vegetarian khichdi was a way to indulge in dairy, with lots of melted butter and even slices of fried cheese.

This sounds delicious and perhaps, should be imported back to India, along with kedgeree and koshari, like Indians who have travelled and then return to enrich their roots with all the ways in which they have changed .

by Vikram Doctor

ETP 8NOV17