Is kedgeree the most hashtag-problematic dish on the brunch menu? Quite possibly, and particularly if you have Indian Marxist parents. As Tania Ahsan wrote in the Guardian in 2007: “I resent that something created from such an unjust occupation can taste so damn good.”
The subject of this month’s How to Eat – the series examining how best to enjoy Britain’s favourite foods – is undoubtedly the definition of high-handed colonial arrogance. The dish’s inspiration, khichuri or khichdi, a combination of rice and lentils available across India in versions from a bland salt-and-turmeric weaning porridge to a garam masala-spiced proto-kedgeree, dates to at least the 4th century BC. In Bengal and modern Bangladesh, khichuri was and is paired with fried fish. Yet despite, if not because, of that history, the occupying forces of British empire felt the dish needed to be refined, prettified and gourmandised. At the height of the British Raj, as if laughing in the face of the poverty they presided over, the British were enjoying veal and salmon versions of this once humble dish. Little wonder kedgeree might leave a bitter taste in the mouth.
Yet, at its best, it is delicious. And in a less conflicted reading of its evolution, the kedgeree we know today emerged not in India but Britain. In his book The Raj at Table, David Burton contends that the addition of smoked haddock was only made possible by the stagecoach distribution of smoked fish across the UK. Kedgeree was possibly popularised by Scottish regiments pining for the food they had enjoyed in India. Moreover, while Victorian recipes often called for no more seasoning than salt, pepper or cayenne, kedgeree has latterly returned to its south Asian roots, in versions that, far from the beige nursery food of empire, are seasoned with curry powder, cardamom, turmeric, garlic, chilli, cumin and cinnamon.
In its way, kedgeree now pays homage to the food culture it emerged from. But what is the best way to eat it? That is where How to eat can help.
When
The idea that kedgeree is a breakfast dish, much less one that is good for hangovers, as Sri Owen asserts in 1993’s The Rice Book, is surely a myth. The cysteine in the eggs might help break down toxic acetaldehyde in your system, but those spices are likely to aggravate sensitive stomachs and, if eaten in any great quantity (has anyone ever eaten a small portion of kedgeree?), may leave you collapsing on the nearest sofa.
As a 7am midweek starter, moreover, on days when you emerge blinking mole-like and resentful into a new day, desperate for the caffeine to kick in, kedgeree (unless you have grown up on spicy breakfasts), is surely too busy, too vivacious, too much at that hour. You want something lighter, simpler, that requires less brain activity.
No, kedgeree is an 11am brunch dish. One that, if feeling daisy-fresh you might contemplate cooking on an idle Sunday morning or, if hungover, you might drag yourself out to order at a local joint, after two hours of intense duvet/antacid therapy. It is perfect at that precise point when the fug begins to recede and the desire to carb-load becomes a kind of temporary insanity.
That is not to say kedgeree is not a lunch and evening dish, too. There is something about it – warming, deeply savoury, perky with spices, a hint of luxury from all that butter and fish – that is very soothing on a wet, windblown autumn evening. A relatively infrequent dish in most home cooks’ repertoires, kedgeree also feels like a treat in, say, the runup to Christmas. It is comfort food, self-care in spiced rice, but also a dish ringed with a residual halo of gilt-edged indulgence (due to its status as a one-time upper-class meal, perhaps).
Additional ingredients
There is a tinned tuna and pea kedgeree recipe on the Birds Eye website that How to Eat finds quite triggering, as anyone with a mouth would. It has no reviews, presumably because counsellors advise their clients against returning to the scene of their deepest trauma.
In fairness, Birds Eye is not alone in this appalling improvisation. How to Eat would urge you not to Google it, but you will find sites out there – yes, the internet is a cesspit – that recommend adding cauliflower, prawns, button mushrooms and leeks to your innocent kedgeree. Garnishing your kedgeree with sultanas should, likewise, be an offence that merits at least 180 hours of community service.
Eggs
Essential – but only boiled, please. That cheffy affectation of perching a softly poached egg on top looks nice but is ludicrous. A runny yolk turns a kedgeree into an unedifying gloop of wet rice. Instead, you want a profusion of boiled eggs that while not ruinously hard-boiled – no one wants to eat kedgeree mined with dry, chalky lumps of solid yolk – should be cooked enough that the white offers a firm, creamy textural contrast to the soft graininess of the rice and the silkier fish. They should be taut ovoids of joy in this mix, their yolks still gently yielding at the centre.
That will not be the case if a) those eggs are ruggedly chopped into the kedgeree – they must be halved, not quartered – or b), if those eggs have been inexpertly reheated. The tendency in cafes and restaurants to cook, ice and hold cooked eggs, which are then reheated in hot water (réchauffé or “refreshed” eggs, as chefs sometimes refer to them), is fine if done properly, but disastrous if it leaves the egg cold in the middle. Nothing kills a kedgeree more than biting into a fridge-cold egg in its warm, fragrant midst.
Garnishing
In this Insta-age, How to Eat is fighting a doomed, rearguard action for ugly food – dishes presented in ways that make culinary rather than aesthetic sense. But so be it. While chefs and food stylists continue to put the tit in titivation, How to Eat will go down moaning – kedgeree being a case in point.
Pretty much everything that is done to adorn kedgeree detracts from how it tastes. If you believe it needs a lick of lemon, why serve it with a lemon wedge on the side (prissily wrapped in muslin)? That lemon should be judiciously added in the kitchen so it is evenly distributed, rather than leaving it to diners to haphazardly hose their kedgeree with lemon juice.
Serving kedgeree artfully dusted with dry, powdery mouthfuls of smoked paprika or chilli powder is equally daft. The only upside is these rarely taste of anything because, certainly in a domestic setting, they have often been in the cupboard since the Boer war. Like lemon juice, chives and parsley either add an essential flavour dimension to kedgeree and, therefore, should be thoroughly mixed through it, or they have no role. There is no halfway house. Chopping those herbs and scattering them across the dish is marginally better than leaving great unnavigable parsley fronds on top or whole crisscrossed chives (the former is manslaughter, the latter murder), but both habits could only have arisen in professional kitchens where bored chefs amuse themselves with entirely unnecessary stylistic innovations (see also: toppings of crispy onion).
Equipment
The tendency to arrange rice dishes on flat plates in a kind of Himalayan peak, which falls apart at the first forkful, is bizarre. The resulting scattered debris feels, somehow, deflating. Instead, a wide shallow bowl with a decent rim allows for some pleasing-to-the-eye elevation (How to Eat can do pretty if it does not detract from flavour), but that hillock of kedgeree is also safely contained within the pleasing circular format. The bowl is the crockery most suggestive of warmth, hugs, home, hearth and satiated fullness.
Ornately decorating a kedgeree with expensive seafood, like serving it in little Le Creuset pots or similarly pretentious tableware, is in the same lineage as early imperial attempts to put an upmarket, elegant spin on it. It shows a lack of confidence, if not a patronising attitude to Asian rice dishes. This is not just a rice dish. It does not need redesigning or elevating to justify itself. It is already perfect.
Nor does it need to be served with a fork, a largely impractical utensil when eating from a bowl with curved sides, and particularly in this case. The unspoken hierarchy that in western food deems spoonable dishes as juvenile or downmarket is ridiculous. Everything in a kedgeree should yield to a spoon’s edge and can be scooped up in its bowl. Using a fork is an unnecessary concession to an outmoded idea of good manners.
Drink
Wine buffs often flag up lightly oaked chardonnay as the pairing for smoked fish, but the mass-produced stuff is honeyed, cloying, flabby dreck and the good stuff will cost you circa £15 a bottle and upwards, stratospherically so at times. In lieu of equally exorbitant champagne, How to Eat would instead go for a dry, fresh cava with reasonable acidity. Such characteristics, like its carbonation, mean it will revive your palate no matter how greasy, spicy or smoky your kedgeree is. Alternatively, a good, herbal, lemon-kissed Czech pils would work, as would iced sparkling water if you are off the booze.
So, kedgeree: how do you eat yours?
