Tomato

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.

In Sri Lanka, an island nation, fish is a staple. It is used in salads, as stuffing for savory pastries, as a flavoring in relishes, as a snack food with drinks, and, of course, in hundreds of curries. This particular curry was served to me for breakfast on a sunny patio at Castlereigh, a tea planter’s home turned boutique hotel, along with fresh rice noodles and good, hot tea. On that cool morning in the mountains nothing could have tasted finer. Almost any fish may be used here, as long as it is firm and holds its shape—swordfish, salmon, pompano, sole, haddock, kingfish, and mackerel. I have used swordfish. Serve with Plain Jasmine Rice and Gujarati-Style Okra.

I first had this sauce, or one similar to it, in the late 1940s. India had just been partitioned, and a refugee family fleeing from what was to become Pakistan had just opened a small, simple restaurant in the center of Delhi called Moti Mahal. It basically served foods baked in the clay oven called a tandoor. There was one sauced dish, however, Chicken Makhani. A tandoor-roasted chicken was cut up with a cleaver and then heated up in this tomatoey, buttery, creamy sauce. I have always loved the sauce. Over the years, I have played around with it, using it with shrimp, and now with salmon. Serve with Swiss Chard with Ginger and Garlic and Rice Pilaf with Almonds and Raisins.

I used to make this dish with fillets of halibut until the cost, at least in New York, made me look at other fish. Now I use cod or hake. They both flake a bit more but still manage to hold their shape. Salting them ahead of time helps hold them together. I like to use fresh tomatoes even if they are out of season, as they are gentler in flavor. I grate the tomatoes on the coarsest part of a four-sided grater (see method on page 289), which removes the skin but keeps the seeds. Four medium tomatoes will yield roughly 1 3/4 cups of fresh puree, about what you need here. Light and lovely, this dish is best served with rice. I like to add a dal and perhaps a green, leafy vegetable.

Here I use boneless fish fillets with skin—porgies, red snapper, mackerel, bluefish, gray mullet, redfish, trout, or anything else of modest size. If the fillets are too long, I cut them into convenient 3–4-inch lengths so I can turn them easily in a frying pan. The spicy undercoat is made simply in a food processor or chopper, though you could chop finely by hand if you prefer. If you want to keep the meal simple, serve this fish with Potato Chaat and Spinach with Garlic and Cumin or a salad.

Somewhere between the famous Mulligatawny Soup of the mixed-race Anglo-Indians and the soupy lentil-tomato-pasta dish, dal dholki, of the vegetarians of the western state of Gujarat, lies this soup. It is made with red lentils and tomatoes and may be served with a dollop of plain white rice or with some cooked pasta (pappardelle, noodles, macaroni) added to the soup just before it is heated for serving. This soup, plus a salad, makes for a perfect lunch or supper. There are three simple steps to follow here. First you boil up the lentils. As they cook, you sauté the seasonings. Then you combine the two and blend them.

Gujaratis in western India do not actually drink soups as such. They do have many soupy dishes, which are meant to be eaten with flatbreads, rice, or spongy, savory, steamed cakes known as dhoklas. Here is one such dish. It makes for a gorgeous soup. I serve it with a little dollop of cream and a light sprinkling of ground roasted cumin (page 284), though these are not at all essential. In the summer months, I make my own tomato puree and use that to make the soup. Store-bought puree is perfectly good too. In Gujarat a similar dish is served with homemade noodles in it. It is known as dal dhokli. I sometimes throw small quantities of cooked pasta bow ties or even macaroni into the soup.

I love to make this soup in the summer, when my garden (or the local farmers market) is bursting with cucumbers and tomatoes and the weather is balmy. The first time I had this soup, or a version of it, was in the Maldives, at the Cocoa Island resort on the South Male Atoll, just southwest of India. For the soup, the chef, Stana Johnson, had combined South Indian seasonings and the notion of North India’s favorite cucumber raita, a yogurt relish, to fashion a light summery, cooling soup. I remember sitting in an airy pavilion, the calm blue sea on two sides of me, balmy breezes blowing past, sipping the soup a tablespoon at a time, and thinking, “This is what heaven must be like.” While the flavors were easy on the tongue, the soup was complicated to make. I have spent two years simplifying it, trying to retain its essence while cutting down on all the steps a large-staffed restaurant can do with ease. I like to serve the soup with a dollop of Yogurt Rice, page 26 or 217, right in its center. This is not essential. Just a light sprinkling of diced cucumbers and diced cherry tomatoes will do. But do try it once with the Yogurt Rice as well as the sprinkling of cucumbers and tomatoes. (You do not actually have to make the full Yogurt Rice recipe. A very quick version, made with leftover rice, follows.)

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.

A great variety of vegetable fillings exist. Vegetables with a meat filling are meant to be eaten hot, those with a meatless filling are usually cooked in oil and eaten cold. In Turkey these are called yalangi dolma or “false dolma,” because of the lack of meat. The following are the fillings most widely used. Quantities are enough to stuff about 2 pounds of vegetables, but this varies according to the size of the vegetables and the amount of pulp scooped out.

Although this is not a pickle, I am including the recipe because it is a very useful sauce to have at hand when required, and it can be prepared in advance and stored in jars. It keeps for months if the surface remains covered with a film of oil.

The eggplants are usually fried, but for those who want to broil them, that too can be done, as they are then cooked further in a tomato sauce.

You can use any firm white fish, such as cod, bream, hake, or haddock, for this Algerian couscous.

Tunisia is famous for fish couscous. This uncommon one is elegant and aromatic, with the mingled scents of saffron and quince. Have the fish cleaned and left whole. It is usually steamed in a separate steamer, but it is better to bake it in foil in the oven, which is a way of steaming it.

This Algerian couscous is like a fish soup served over the grain. Small fish are left whole and large ones are cut into steaks, but I prefer to use fillets, because it is unpleasant to deal with fish bones here. Use firm white fish such as turbot, bream, cod, haddock, and monkfish.

This old Turkish classic is a meal in itself, to be accompanied by a salad.