Recipe: Chilli cheese toast | The Spinoff
Cheese on toast is a humble classic, and cultures the world over have given it their own twist. In Mumbai, Perzen Patel grew up with the Indo-Chinese version, with optional (hidden) fried egg. Here’s how to make it at home.
As a kid living in Mumbai in the late 90s there were only types of restaurants to choose from – Indian, Chinese or continental. For the people who couldn’t choose, like my family, there was the local restaurant Solitaire, which had a 12-page menu and served everything from tandoori chicken to sesame prawn toast to pepper steak.
I didn’t know about dim sum back then. Or, the difference between Sichuan and Cantonese food. If it had chillies, spring onion or soy sauce in it, I assumed it was Chinese. Like Schezwan fried rice and hot and sour soup. Turns out both of those dishes were Indo-Chinese, a whole sub-cuisine that’s very hard to find in New Zealand.
Another popular Indo-Chinese dish was chilli cheese toast.
My working theory is that chilli cheese toast was born from sesame prawn toast, but some Hindu vegetarian decided that they’d skip the prawns altogether and the sesame too. It was available not just at vegetarian Chinese restaurants but also at gymkhanas, continental restaurants, Bombay’s Irani cafes and curiously, at my Gujarati neighbour’s house.
You can have chilli cheese toast by itself or topped with a sunny-side-up fried egg.
If you do the latter, then you’ve left China altogether and you’re now eating eggs Kejriwal, a dish created in the early 50s at Bombay’s Willingdon Sports Club for the rich Hindu merchant Devi Prasad Kejriwal. Rumour has it that he loved eggs but couldn’t eat them in his Hindu home. The chefs at Willingdon hid the eggs under a pile of cheese lest someone saw him.
CHILLI CHEESE TOAST
Serves 2
- generous helping of butter
- ¼ teaspoon garlic paste
- ¼ teaspoon ginger paste
- salt to taste
- crushed black pepper
- handful of mint, finely chopped
- 2 spring onions, finely chopped
- 1 green…
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