Waking up to stories of sustenance

The morning meal can mean many things, from sustenance to memory, and sharing. Priyadarshini Chatterjee narrates how breakfast has evolved over the decades and how it tells stories of cities and communities.

Even if I am not a believer in ‘rising with the sun’, I quite like waking up to the promise of a sumptuous breakfast — it could be a warm, chewy, sesame-crusted bagel slathered with cream cheese from my neighbourhood café, perhaps, or a thhala heaped with piping hot, puffed-up luchi paired with nigella-scented potato curry, once the non-negotiable Sunday breakfast at my parents’ home in Kolkata, or even a plate of hot kanda poha that appears frequently on my breakfast table in my Mumbai house.

The diversity of breakfast food across the country is mind boggling, but even more intriguing is what the morning meal reveals about cities, people, lives and livelihoods, of stories told and those ignored.

A non-linear history

The story of the morning meal, or breakfast, isn’t a linear one. Many believe that we are originally a two-meal culture — one at midday and the other in the evening. But, there are numerous references in historical texts that speak of an older, longer tradition of a morning meal. Besides, for a society as diverse and striated as ours, divided on class and caste lines, a uniform eating pattern is unlikely. What and when one eats has historically depended on who they were and what they did.

Buddhist texts, for instance, refer to monks partaking of a slight early morning repast of rice cakes and milk, or sour gruel. The Kummasapinda Jataka mentions how Bodhisatta, in his past life as a wage worker, bought sour gruel for his breakfast and went out to his farm work. The idea of a morning meal is also woven into language. For instance, Sanskrit words pratarasa and kalyavarta denoted a light morning meal. In the ancient Sanskrit play, Svapnavasavadatta by Bhasa, the king’s companion Vasantaka — whose fondness for sweet food is well known — laments that he could not eat anything in the morning, when he was sure to get a rich dish for breakfast.

But the morning meal, across the world, has first served as sustenance for labouring masses. Agrarian folks would often eat a small meal at the crack of dawn to fuel their bodies for hours of hard labour in the fields.

In India, traditional morning meals, especially among the agrarian masses, often consisted of dishes like kanji and fermented rice gruel in the south and east, and stale chapatis eaten with buttermilk or even a handful of roasted gram with a bit of jaggery across northern regions. In fact, for the masses, the morning meal or breakfast was often repurposed leftovers from the previous night. In many parts of the country, the word baasi or stale/leftovers is used as a synonym for breakfast.

The morning meal, of course, has evolved over time. Colonial rule, industrialisation, and later economic liberalisation have all reconfigured the meal. Colonial trade, for instance, introduced novelties like bread, biscuits, malted drinks and beverages like tea and coffee that were once taboo among orthodox Hindus, particularly the caste elite, on grounds of impurity and pollution, but without which our mornings are unthinkable today. But for many, the morning meal remains a matter of necessity, as sustenance for labour and the day’s uncertainties.

The phenomenon of morning meals is integral to urban landscapes too. Think of the migrant labourers gathered around a thattukada in Kochi digging into plates of mutton chops cooked in a thin gravy of roasted coconut and deep fried savala vadas. Then, there are the odd jobbers and daily wagers who stand on street corners around Old Delhi’s labour chowks dunking rusks into cups of sweet, gingery milk tea.

At the dockyards and fish markets of Mumbai, fishermen and fishmongers, men and women, polish off plates of rice and shingala amti or bhakhris paired with piquant Bombil chutney. Across Indian cities, breakfast spaces are primarily occupied by the working masses. These breakfasts are nothing like the ones served up in bougie breakfast cafes. This is functional food that feeds people on the move.

In the bazaars of Shillong, for instance, people dig into plates of rice served with a rainbow of accompaniments — eclectic condiments, minimalist curries and smoked meats — early in the morning. In Delhi, outside railways stations and construction sites, men polish off plates of rajma chawal and kadhi chawal, as early as 8 am. In fact, it is not uncommon in many Indian households to eat a full rice and curry meal before leaving for the day’s work. In fact, growing up in Kolkata, my school-day breakfast was often a mush of buttered rice paired with mashed potatoes and crisp fried pavé of fish or boiled eggs. It’s a meal I still long for on certain hurried mornings.

Food and stories of people

Food is such a tenacious carrier of memories as it is gravid with stories and history. Breakfast foods and establishments across the country also tell tales of people and communities, or homes and hearth left behind, and migrant labour and enterprise that runs cities. Take for instance, the unctuous plates of dal gosht or gurda kaleji maghaz cooked in rich gravies, or plump beef tikiyas made with minced meat, often the cheaper cuts, served early in the morning in the Muslim eateries in Kolkata, that nourish crowds of working class men who fill up on these calorie-dense meals before the day’s work begins.

These dishes and establishments do not tell the story of an exiled royal and his entourage that dominate stories around Kolkata’s fabled Mughlai food. These breakfast spreads train the spotlight on numerous waves of migrants from around the country.

In Bengaluru, where breakfast stories are dominated by the vegetarian offerings of hotels and restaurants started by Brahmins who migrated from the Udupi region, ‘military hotels’ serve up everything from robust meat curries and pulaos, but also offal and blood — food often associated with the marginalised, and pushed to the boundaries of dominant food narratives.

While popular narratives celebrate the city’s rice-based delicacies like idli and dosey, crowds gather around roadside stalls to drink glasses of ragi ganji or ambali, a gruel made of ragi and broken wheat, served mixed with majjige or buttermilk, a recipe concocted to support hard labour, and perhaps not spotlighted in breakfast stories because the resilient ragi, before it became a fad, has primarily been food of the marginalised.

(The author is a journalist and food-culture writer who has just published First Bite: Breakfast Stories from Urban India, Speaking Tiger Books.)