Eggs Kejriwal

… and no, nothing to do with Arvind

The other day we had gone for a coffee and light lunch to Tim Horton’s. My husband ordered a loaded egg toastie and like it so much, he ordered another. I had already eaten, but was intrigued: what was this dish he was swooning over?

It’s simple. A basic chilli-cheese toast, topped with some scrambled egg. As far as I (without eating it) could tell. My husband said it might have had some crumbled paneer added into it; he wasn’t sure. Whatever it was, it was very good.

‘It’s eggs Kejriwal,’ I said. ‘Or a riff on it.’

This is one dish I know about, because the name intrigued me so when I first heard it (which, by the way, was during the tenure of Arvind Kejriwal as Chief Minister of Delhi). I had wondered, then, if someone was trying to suck up to the CM by naming a dish after him.

After all, dishes have been named after the powerful, the rich, and the famous, for many centuries now. Some—pavlova, peach melba, beef Wellington, veal stroganoff, Victoria sponge cake—are so well-known, they have spawned versions and fusions and whatnot (think mushroom stroganoff, beet Wellington, etc). Others are less famous. Wikipedia, for instance, has an entire page devoted to foods named after people, and there are not just people here who have long fallen by the wayside of public memory, but dishes, too, which no-one remembers anymore.

I went through that list of dishes some months back, while working on a series of articles I will be posting later on. But what struck me then is that there are no Indians on that list. There is one Indian dish: the Kolkata sweet known as ledikeni, named after Lady Canning (1817-61), but I don’t really count that. Lady Canning herself wasn’t Indian, after all.

But Devi Prasad Kejriwal certainly was. A member of Mumbai’s Willingdon Sports Club during the 1960s, Kejriwal (a Marwari, and otherwise a vegetarian) was very fond of eggs. The story goes that he couldn’t eat eggs at home because his family would throw a fit; and he didn’t want to be seen eating eggs in public, either (because friends who also frequented the club might spot him)—so he requested the chef at the Willingdon to fry an egg, place it on toast, and top it with melted cheese and chopped chillies. It became a staple of Kejriwal’s. And soon the dish became popular among Kejriwal’s friends at the club, enough for the club to eventually put it on its menu.

Eggs Kejriwal remained confined to the Willingdon until some years back, when (possibly because Arvind Kejriwal had become Delhi’s CM and the name suddenly had high recall value) it shot into the limelight. Many restaurants, many clubs and cafés and breakfast places (and Tim Horton’s, above) now do versions of eggs Kejriwal. Even the New York Times has a recipe, very similar to that of Food and Wine (which is what I followed). It’s basically a chilli-cheese toast, topped with a fried egg. Gooey, hot, with that kick from the green chilies and the chopped raw onion, all contrasting brilliantly with that crisp, buttery toast. Yum.

Kejriwal gets all my thanks for inventing this dish.

(NB. I did end up tasting the Tim Horton’s version, and it is good. Third Wave Coffee also offers an ‘eggs Kejriwal bun’, which is nothing like the real thing. This one comes with sautéed mushrooms, and while it tastes all right, it’s not eggs Kejriwal at all).

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