Finger Food Revamped

It’s funny how people from different cultures can take not only the same ingredients, but also the same cooking methods, and make something completely different for a completely different purpose. This I learned last night from Shammi and Atul. Atul stopped by for a short visit to discuss a few things, and according to Indian etiquette, Shammi decided to make a small snack to keep our mouths busy for the time being. The dish of choice? Scrambled eggs. Yum! But it’s a different kind of yum then what I eat for breakfast in America.

First, let me tell you about American scrambled eggs. They’re based on the French method for scrambled eggs, only with a heck of a lot less cream. What you do is beat the eggs until they are all the same consistency, then add a about a tablespoon of milk per egg, along with some salt and pepper to taste. With a minimum of spices, you can get the full taste of the egg to shine in the final dish, which is what you’re after. To cook them, pour the mixture into a cool frying pan that has a little bit of butter on it. Then you put it into the heat. Don’t put it into a hot frying pan, because that’s how you make a French-style omelette. Scrambled eggs should be different. They should be loose, soft, a little bit creamy, and still hold themselves together on the plate and the on fork that makes it’s way to your eager mouth. Continuously move the eggs around with a wooden or plastic spatula while you turn the heat up to medium flame and the eggs cook slowly. As the heat increases, the eggs will start to come together and become solid, but it will happen slowly. Now, here’s the most important part: remove the eggs from the heat before they are finished. Eggs and egg-based dishes continue to cook themselves from residual heat after they are removed from the hot pan, and if you want perfectly cooked scrambled eggs that are soft and delicate, you must put them on your plate while they are still a little bit runny. Trust me on this, because if you follow these instructions, after a couple of minutes, you will be eating the best eggs you have ever eaten in your life. They’ll be so soft and fluffy that you can spread them like jam on a piece of toast. That’s what my brother said, anyway.

Needless to say, Indian scrambled eggs are a bit different. First, you dice a quarter head of cabbage and three green chili peppers (Serrano peppers, if you’re in the U.S.) for three eggs. While you do that, keep the frying pan on high heat with a very small amount of oil. It will get very hot. First, you sauté the cabbage and peppers in the oil for a couple of minutes until the peppers are soft. You then pour the eggs into the very hot pan. They will immediately start to harden and seize up, so keep moving them around with a spatula. And keep doing it, for longer than you want to do so. When I did it while Shammi prepared muttar paneer (absolutely delicious, one of my favorite Indian dishes), I kept taking them off the heat, and Shammi kept putting them back one. It happened at least three times, because I continuously felt like I was overcooking the eggs. They were completely together and the pan was dry, but apparently, I was supposed to keep coking them until they were dry and lifeless.

The result? Delicious, and different. It was finger food, actually. There was no moisture left in the eggs, which makes for really bad breakfast, but since all the pieces were separated, it was great finger food. I hadn’t seen anything like it before. Even badly cooked scrambled eggs in the states had more moisture then this treat, but you wouldn’t eat Indian scrambled eggs for breakfast. Hard, dry and spicy, these eggs were meant for a snack.

Which makes me think of a cultural difference that I haven’t yet brought up. Most Indians eat food with their hands. Even wet dishes like a water dal soaked in rice are scooped up with one’s fingers. Your fingertips become premature taste buds that can taste the spicy dishes a few moments before they reach your tongue. It’s messy, sure, but that’s why you wash your hand before dinner. It’s also why you don’t eat with your left hand, because that’s the hand you use to wipe your ass. Don’t touch your food with it. Yuck.

Anyway, Indian scrambled eggs are completely different then their American counterpart, but they are certainly delicious in their own way. It makes me think, how else can we combine the same ingredients that we’ve had for thousands of years in new and exciting ways? How can the butter, sugar, eggs and flour be used to make a new kind of cake, or how can garlic be cooked in a different way to yield a new taste? That’s what I was after when I made monkey balls, and that’s what I want to keep on searching for in the rest of my time here. I only have 6 months to investigate the hundreds of ingredients at my disposal. Better hurry!