kedgree/khitchdi/khichuri

Photo credit:www.bbc.com & www.food.ndtv.com
Memory tags: The melting pot of flavours and textures that makes kedgeree/ khitchdi/khitchuri standout; each individual yet part of an organic whole.

On many a Sunday morning we would have a leisurely breakfast in our alfresco dinning space. Bougainvillea blossoms painted its tin roof a gorgeous magenta against a sun glazed sky. We sat back on comfortable chairs around the pale blue glass topped table, all wrought iron. The centre piece was a white generous bowl patterned with luscious vegetables and full to the brim with kedgeree. Warm, aromatic, tongue tingling, soul satisfying kedgeree( I can almost feel what inspired Edward Lear to write “Beauuuuutiful Sooooup!”)Chopped onions turned pink in , a sane amount of butter to flavour the precooked long grained rice. A few cautious whole slit green chillies thrown in, salt, and the right amount of lemon juice to make it distinctly tangy but not sour; the whole turned in a wok. Generously garnished with wedges of boiled eggs, carefully mixed in to give tantalizing touches of white and yellow among the tingling green of the final touch of garden fresh coriander leaves!( Precaution: the rice grains should hug lightly and not cling steamily! Pilaf ingrained individualism is not welcome in a kedgeree).Fish replaces egg in total piscine versions.

We would take generous helpings in bowls, which were brown coloured outside and soft blue inside where small dragons played! We would sit round, chat and laze. The elder statesman in the family believed good food and conversation went together. He would rather do an Oscar Wilde than have DTH television service. The first black and white television set entered out home very apologetically in 1985; decades after the nationwide telecast. But the east and west did mesh and the world came home through newspapers, radio, books, magazines, music, painting and conversation. The kedgeree in abstract?

The kedgeree is probably so early an edition of fusion food that it only got labelled Anglo-Indian! Its original Indian avatar is probably the common khitchdi or khitchuri. When the first cool winds bring in the rain laden monsoon clouds after the torrid summer, lentils and rice are swirled together to the rhythm of spices and an orchestrated medley of vegetables. As the raindrops keep falling, the kithchuri is eaten with ghee (be generous), pickles( be naughty), then fried titbits or the heavenly fired hilsa( the ultimate sin)! In the cool dry Indian weather the gentle winter sun harvests the vegetables that are partial to the cold. Carrots, peas, cauliflower, newly harvested potatoes are thrown in and delectably round up in a five spice mixture called panch phoran in Bengal.The sweet and sour chutney made from tomatoes( originally from South America) or the Soyong from Meghalaya adds a palate licking zest to the khichuri.

Food became global long before the term itself was fashionable. The kedgeree/ khitchdi/khitchuri is a perfect melting pot of flavours and textures; each individual yet part of an organic whole. Runny or dry, common or regal, each part of our country has its own version, with rice, lentils and ghee irreplaceable parts of the whole.