Quick

An Anglo-Indian acquaintance in Calcutta once told me that when he went to buy his sausages from the family butcher, he always took along the spices he wanted as flavoring. He would hand these to the butcher and then watch as his choice of meat was ground, seasoned, and pushed into casings. I made a note of the seasonings and now make those sausages all the time. I do not always bother with the casings. I make sausage patties, using all the same spices. We eat these with eggs on Sundays, ensconced between slices of bread as sandwiches, or I put them into a curry (see next recipe), just as Anglo-Indian families have been doing over the years.

A karhai is an Indian wok (many anthropologists believe that the utensil actually originated in India), and this is a stir-fried dish. I like dark meat and prefer chicken thighs here, but lovers of white meat may use boned and skinned chicken breasts. Serve it with rice or Indian (or Middle Eastern) flatbreads. You could serve the Mushroom and Pea Curry on the side. You could also have this cold, even take it on a picnic.

Here is a very easy-to-prepare egg curry. As the entire curry sauce is made in the blender, I call it a blender curry. If you like, 2–3 medium-sized boiled and diced (a 3/4-inch dice is best) potatoes may be added to the sauce at the same time as the eggs. Serve with rice or any of the three breads in this book. You may also have the curry with French or Italian bread.

Here is our family’s most beloved Sunday breakfast/brunch dish. I prepare all the ingredients beforehand and then scramble the eggs as we are sitting down to eat. Toast or heated flatbreads should be served on the side. I like to use the asafetida as it gives a truffle-like aroma, but you could leave it out if you wish. You may have this with slices of French or Italian bread, with toast, or with any of the three Indian breads in this book.

In our house, we all like different types of omelettes. We tend to make our own. This is how I make mine. Indians generally eat their omelettes with sliced bread, toast, or parathas.

We all love these in our family. Put the boiled eggs in egg cups, and have a saltcellar filled with seasoned salt on the side. I like to eat the eggs with toast cut into “soldiers”—long strips, perfect for dunking into the egg.

Here is a quick stir-fry that you might serve with Plain Jasmine Rice and Corn with Aromatic Seasonings.

Here is a very quick way to stir-fry shrimp so they are encrusted with spices. They are hot, sour, and utterly delicious. The dish may be served as a first course, as a light lunch with a salad, or as part of a larger Indian meal. Sri Lankan Rice with Cilantro and Lemon Grass goes well with this, as well as the Mushroom and Pea Curry.

In Bangladesh, the basic diet is fish and rice. It is not fish from the Bay of Bengal, the sea that rules their shores, that the people thrive on. In fact, they hardly touch that. What they love is the sweet-water fish that comes from their estuaries, rivers, lakes, and ponds. Since local Bangladeshi fish are unavailable to most of us, I have adapted this recipe to fillet of flounder. One of the common local seasonings is an aromatic lime leaf very similar to the kaffir lime leaf of Thailand. If you cannot get that, use fresh curry leaves, or, failing that, fresh basil leaves. Serve with plain rice, a dal, and a vegetable or salad.

This is easily one of my favorite first courses for dinner parties, one that I have served repeatedly over the years. Most of the work—and there is very little of it—can be done in advance, and the last-minute stir-frying, which is the ideal way to cook this, takes just a few minutes. If you wish to do the entire cooking in advance, you may, just remember to reheat the shrimp over a low flame. I have even served this dish with drinks. I just stick a toothpick in each shrimp and hand out napkins! If you cannot find fresh curry leaves, tear up 10 fresh basil leaves and use them instead.

Here is a dish that, as far as I know, was only served in India by my own family. My mother made it; my grandmother made it. It was made only when peas were young and fresh. Even Indians (from other families and from other parts of India) who have dined with us in the pea season are surprised by it. It requires whole, fresh peas in their pods. I grow my own peas, and this is the first dish I make with them when they are ready for picking. You have to eat the peas rather like artichoke leaves: you put the whole pea pod in your mouth, holding on to it by its stem end, clench your teeth, and pull. What you get to eat are not just the peas themselves but also the softened outsides of the shells. You discard the fibrous bits after getting all the goodness out of them. We ate this as a snack or at teatime, but I have taken to serving it as a first course.

I often offer these as an appetizer. I serve them just the way they are, but you could also serve them on toasted slices of Italian bread or just buttered toast.

I love cheese toast the way it is done in India—with some chopped fresh green chilies and cilantro thrown in. We like to serve it with tea, as we seem to love the combination of spicy snacks and very hot tea! You can use any white bread (or brown, if you prefer), any cheese you like (I happen to like sharp cheddar), and the chilies could be fresh green ones (about 1/4 teaspoon, well chopped) but the pickled Greek ones are fine too, and, as I always have them on hand in my refrigerator and I like the tartness they provide, I use them instead. Some Anglo-Indian recipes have the yolks of hard-boiled eggs mixed with mustard spread inside the sandwich as well. I make my sandwich in a frying pan, but a panini press, if you have one of those, would work too.

When I was growing up in Delhi, my mother regularly deep-fried cashews for us in a karhai (wok). She would scoop the nuts up from the hot oil with a slotted spoon and leave them to drain on a crisp sheet of brown paper—the same kind she used to cover our schoolbooks. My father ate them with his evening whisky-and-soda and the rest of us nibbled on them with our soft drinks. I have now taken to roasting the cashews instead. Nothing could be easier.

Known by different names in the north and south of India, these crisp wafers are an essential part of Indian cuisine, as “something with a crunch” completes a meal in many parts of India. Known as pappadoms in the south and papar/papad in the north, they are generally made out of a split-pea dough that is rolled out into paper-thin round discs and dried in the sun (the desert areas of India are ideal for this). The ones I like best are made of urad dal (page 284) and flavored with peppercorns. You buy them from Indian grocers, but they still need cooking. The traditional way was to fry them in very hot oil for a few seconds, which made them expand into marvelous Frank Gehry shapes. Now I just cook them in the microwave oven. They do not expand as much, but they still take on Zaha Hadid shapes and are wonderfully crunchy without being oily. Make as many pappadoms as you wish, and serve them with drinks or as part of a meal.