Khichree a comforting, easy-to-assemble meal

I received the following email recently, seeking my help with a family recipe I wrote about in the past: “Several months ago you gave a simple family recipe for kedgeree. I made it. We loved it. It reminded us of our life in Calcutta in the ‘60s. Now I’ve lost the recipe. I’ve tried others. Yours is the best.

“I can’t locate it in the Palm Beach Post archives, no matter how I phrase the request. I’d be very grateful if you’d direct me to the recipe once again. I promise to save it permanently! Your fan, Terri Zionts.”

Thanks to Terri for being a loyal reader of my column, which I have been writing for more than 30 years. Part of the reason she couldn’t find the Oct. 16, 2016 column in the archives was probably my fault: I could have mentioned more prominently the common English word “kedgeree,” the British corruption of the Indian word “khichree,” which means a melange of often disparate things.

It may be a “corruption,” but English was, and is, the language of power, and it is kedgeree that all my cookbooks and dictionaries mention; nary a nod to the “real” Indian word.

Here is the column again, with the recipe:

We were all shuttered up and hunkered down, but Hurricane Matthew gave us a gracious bye. It did, however, cause a bit of rain and stormy weather. And that triggered a recipe response – one that came from deep down the depth of my past, in the eastern part of British India. I didn’t have to ask my wife Kaisari what’s for lunch; we simultaneously said “khichree,” a hodgepodge of rice and lentil, cooked curry-style into a fragrant, spicy gruel.

There is a reason why khichree is connected to stormy weather. In old Dacca (now spelled Dhaka), which was for centuries the principal city of eastern Bengal, long before the Brits had left and the Indian subcontinent was partitioned in 1947, people bought most of their daily groceries from open-air markets. When there was inclement weather, sellers from the hinterland couldn’t or wouldn’t show up.

But families would have staples like rice, daal (lentils), oil and spices at home, which formed the basis for a filling meal in the form of a hodgepodge called khichree, often served with omelet made out of eggs from the chicken coop, as well potato bhaji (a curried potato dish). The British sahibs got into the act too, calling the dish kedgeree in their peculiar penchant for distorting local nomenclature, and they embellished the simple dish with fish and fowl.

This was the rainyweather norm in all parts of the subcontinent, and I guess it still is. As the meaning of the Indian word khichree suggests, it is a non sequitur melange of whatever one has at home for a quick and easy meal. Its ease of preparation also made it a common food that was made in bulk – like 50, 60 or even 100 pounds – on religious feast days for distribution among the poor. I remember in my childhood (I am 86 now) when khichree was cooked in 80-pound zinced-copper cauldrons for the feast of Ashura, the 10th day of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar, commemorating the battle of Karbala.

The recipe is simple. I hope you will find it to your taste, too, as the pukka sahibs once did.