Eggs: Anyhow, anytime, anywhere

For as long as I can remember, I have been in love with eggs. There is no other food  (with the possible exception of milk, another ‘vegetarian’ animal product) that is more versatile.  You can eat your eggs in the simplest way possible, just by boiling them. If they are nicely soft-boiled, then all you need are a few fingers of toast and some salt and pepper. If they are hard-boiled (far more common in India), then you can shell them, dip them in a salt, pepper and red chilli powder mix and eat them bit by bit. (Though, to be fair, this is my least favourite way of eating hen’s eggs and it only works with the white. The yolk turns into an ugly, yellow ball.)

Or you can eat your eggs as part of an Indian meal. Throughout my misspent youth, my favourite  dish at the more basic dhabhas I frequented was andey-ka-bhurji (made with onion and a little chopped garlic) with freshly made phulkas. If you are at a slightly better class of dhabha (ie: where the cook actually knows  what to do), then you can get them to make you a baida roti by breaking the egg on a paratha and then frying it.

Still sticking with the Indian recipes, you can have your eggs cooked in curry. Most of the cheaper Muslim restaurants in the Bombay of my childhood would routinely put hardboiled eggs into their oily curries. The recipes didn’t really call for them but eggs were cheaper than meat and their inclusion made the curry seem fuller.