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Do you have a favourite one dish meal? If that term sounds a little confusing, let me explain.
All over the West ‘one pot meals’ are all the rage. The name sounds less interesting when you realise that it refers mainly to stews.
So the Brits will use it for such dishes as a Lancashire Hot Pot which is a mutton and potato stew. The French will call a cassoulet (beans with goose, sausage, pork etc.) or Bouef Bourguignon (beef braised in red wine with mushrooms and onions) one pot meals. And so on.
Oddly enough the Italians make less of one-pot meals though lasagne is the king of such meals as, I would imagine, are many other pasta dishes. Likewise with risotto which can be a meal in itself. (And what about pizzas?) The difference I guess, is that Italians have a complicated way of eating their meals and pastas and risottos are not necessarily regarded as main courses while pizza is still not seen as a dish for mealtimes. (Most good restaurants in Italy will not serve pizza; for that you have to go to a pizzeria.)
It’s more difficult for us in India to think of great one pot or one dish meals because the Indian way of eating is to include many different dishes in a meal. A Western vegetarian may be happy enough to treat Cauliflower Cheese or Mac and Cheese as a full meal but no Indian would be content to eat gobhi (cauliflower) on its own. At the very least we would expect a roti to be served alongside if not a dal or another sabzi.
So, when I sat down to compile a list of great Indian one-dish meals I discovered that there are very few dishes we eat on their own. I eased up on the criteria a little. What, I asked myself, would Indians be content eating on its own outside of the confines of the full Indian meal?
Some dishes seemed obvious enough but were controversial. Most of us have often eaten a masala dosa for lunch. But does it count as a proper dish? Most South Indians will laugh in your face if you tell them that a masala dosa makes for a good lunch. (The masala dosa has the pizza problem; it is still not allowed onto the dinner table.)
It’s the same with chaat. You can’t include a vada pav or bhelpuri because no one treats them as meal time dishes. (Fair enough. Western lists don’t include hamburgers or hot dogs on the same grounds.)
Nor can you include most kinds of bread. Most people I know would be happy to eat a stuffed kulcha or a aloo/keema paratha for lunch. But I get it: these are not really regarded as meals on their own.
| "Khichdi is the great Indian comfort dish, with variations that are eaten all over the country and nobody can honestly deny that it is a full meal." |
What does that leave us with?
Rice.
Yups. Think about it. Have you never just had a bowl of khichdi? I do it all the time. It’s my default meal option when I come home after a long flight and though I may sometimes eat it with chokha I am entirely content to eat it on its own. (I am not big on raita ever, anyway.)
Khichdi is the great Indian comfort dish, with variations that are eaten all over the country and nobody can honestly deny that it is a full meal. It has even spread around the world. It inspired the British kedgeree made with smoked fish, though that’s a breakfast dish in the UK. (If you haven’t tried it, here’s a tip: don’t bother.) And there is the Egyptian Koshary which many people say is an adaptation of khichdi though, having tried it all over Egypt, I am more than happy for the Egyptians to take all the credit for it. (It combines rice, dal and pasta. Yes, pasta!)
The greatest rice dish of all of course is biryani which is certainly a meal in itself. When people ask me what the difference between biryani and pulao is, I now get tired of offering all the technical explanations about layering and frying onions. Instead I just say: pulao is a dish but biryani is a meal.
It’s not entirely accurate as a distinction but I think it captures the difference in spirit between the two dishes.
And biryani was designed to be eaten on its own. Now that all the rubbish about it being a royal Persian dish has been debunked its true origins are clear. While pulao may have been the food of kings with middle/ central Asian origins biryani was a Janata dish invented in India during Mughal times to feed the soldiers in the army. All the romanticisation about royal recipes came much later in an effort to hide its simple and utilitarian origins.
Speaking for myself I have no doubt that it is the greatest one pot dish in the world bar none. And judging by the biryani boom of the last decade most Indians agree with me.
There are other single dish meals that I enjoy but I am not sure purists will agree about. I am happy to eat haleem or khichda on their own but most people sneer when I tell them that. As a student in a British boarding school I would sneak out to the local Indian (okay: Bangladeshi) restaurant, order a tandoori chicken and gnaw on it till the bones began to crack. A good tandoori chicken on its own is still more than enough for me. And as a Gujarati I suppose I should make a case for dal dhokli, Gujarat’s most under-recognised one-pot meal.
But let’s be honest. None of these dishes matches up to biryani. It’s a common person’s dish that has been elevated to princely status for the best reason of all: it rules! Ok?
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