Big Bawa Breakfast

Shabnam Minwalla Recalls Her Father As A Man Who Believed In A Hearty Start To The Day With Traditional Parsi Delicacies

- Shabnam Minwalla

Is someone sick?” my father often grumped at the breakfast table when we were children. “Otherwise, why’re we eating invalid food?” This remark about pareji bhonu was half in jest, half in horror. On a good day my mother merely rolled her eyes and continued to serve a low-on-oil, low-on-fuss breakfast. On a bad day she muttered darkly about cholesterol and heart attacks.

My mother is a sensible Bohra who believes in moderation. My father was a Parsi who emphatically did not. Which was why he felt such nostalgia for that most immoderate of meals—the Parsi breakfast. He grew up as part of a boisterous joint family in a rambling house on the outskirts of Hyderabad. “We ate kheema everyday. And aleti paleti,” he maintained. “We ate plain eggs only if we were sick. Very sick. Otherwise we had to have bheja cutlets and gurda-kaleji and akoori and…” With every retelling, those childhood breakfasts became more sumptuous and artery-choking.

Still, my brother and I were wistful. We quite fancied a frilly brain cutlet to bolster us for a day of biology and Marathi. Or redolent kheema topped with chopped onion and a twist of lime. Or kheema ghotala, that spicy, springy dish packed with textures and flavour that emerges when kheema is scrambled with egg and masalas. My mother, though, invariably shuddered. She’s a two-toast, one-cup-of tea person. Certainly not someone who would step into the kitchen at dawn, pop on an apron and start chopping chicken heart, liver and gizzard before frying them with ginger-garlic paste so that she could serve her husband aleti paleti. Or put together a mishmash of goat kidney, liver and lungs enlivened with a slug of toddy, just so that her children could get their fix of gurda-kaleji and a head start on gout.