Food has a way of etching itself into our memories, and it’s usually the simple dishes that stand out. My first ever article took a cursory glance at this idea, and time to re-explore it, with a more specialised approach.

Few dishes are as simple are the humble bread and eggs. Let’s start with a dish that’s famous all over the world. The French call it pain perdu, meaning “lost bread”, the idea being that it is made with stale bread which would’ve been unusable had it not been for this miraculous dish. Aussies and Brits insist on calling it eggy bread, a rather accurate description. Most people however, prefer to call it “French Toast”. But, why the name?

It was Americans who gave the name “French Toast” to this dish because French immigrants in America popularized the dish. In fact, French toast was invented long before France even existed. The first known recorded recipe for French toast comes from Rome around 300 A.D. The Roman author Apicius included it in his cookbook titled “Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome”. For centuries, the French themselves called this dish “Roman Bread”.

Dr. Christopher Baird.

We Bengalis have our own unique version of French toast. “Dim Pauruti” literally means “egg bread”, so it is etymologically quite similar to the Brits. It is a ubiquitous Bengali breakfast dish, made in countless Bengali households. I’ve grown up eating a lot of dim pauruti, most often as cold chewy squares of bread packed hours ago by my mother for school lunch. I’ll have to say, I wasn’t a fan. Although it is easy to whip up and pack for a school tiffin, dim pauruti is something that is best eaten fresh.

And to relish the magnificence of this simple dish, I had to wait for Sundays. Whenever my mother was in a rush and didn’t have enough time to make a full fledged breakfast of loochi and shada alur torkari, she’d whip up some dim pauruti. Cracked eggs in a bowl , seasoned with salt and pepper, then sliced onions andfinely chopped green chillies. Dip the slices of bread in this savoury mixture, and cook on both sides till nice and brown. Done.

Although it is a very simple breakfast dish, dim pauruti is the ultimate dish of contrasts. The way I like it is to have the edges beautifully browned and crisp, providing a stark contrast to the soft interior. It is this crispy bit which gets soggy and leathery after spending 5-6 hours trapped in a tiffin box, which is why it loses most of the magic for me. It is a soft dish, but there is that ever so subtle crunch, the texture of the now beautifully brown slivers of onions, accented with the heat of the chilli. There is no doubt that dim pauruti is a dish best served hot and fresh.

I’ve introduced food semantics in a previous article, and once you get a hang of the topic, you really start seeing examples everywhere. My mother used to use the terms dim pauruti and French toast interchangeably, and so did I. It was later when I started dabbling in foreign cuisines did I find out that although the Western version of French toast follows the same basic principle of bread dipped in an egg batter and fried in fat, that was the only point of similarity. It was then that I decided to stop using the terms as synonyms. The reason is that in the West, French toast is a sweet dish, not savoury.

I later came to know that the French toast in the Southern states is also sweet, as told by two of my colleagues from Karnataka and Kerala. Infact, the dish is called Bombay Toast in most of the Southern states, the savoury version separately earmarked as Masala Bombay Toast, the spicy exception to the sweet norm. The beaten eggs are flavoured not with salt and chillies, but with milk, often accented with vanilla or cinnamon, creating a flourless pancake batter of sorts. The bread is then dipped in it and fried in butter, and garnished with sweet embellishments like maple syrup, fresh fruit or whipped cream.

And yet the name “French toast” will always conjure up memories of freshly fried savoury pieces of bread accented with onion and chillies, mopped up with my favourite hot and sweet tomato ketchup. I’m sure that the idea of a savoury pain perdu would be unthinkable a French maman. Yet there’s always room for experimentation. I, for one, can’t wait to have my first bite of Western French toast. For a sweet tooth who is a sucker for nostalgia, I’m sure it will tick all the right boxes.

Fast forward about a decade, to 2017. It was a night shift during internship, my first ever night shift, infact. It was an 18-hour shift, the ER was packed, and we were absolutely swamped. When the rush finally cleared, I realised it was 3:30 at night, and none of us had had a single bite to eat for dinner. The senior on duty took us all to a small all-night stall, just opposite the main gate of Medical College Kolkata, for a quick bite. It was the start of a tradition that has lasted till date, and it revolves around the simple formula of eggs and bread.

Bread-omelette, or dim toast as it’s called in Kolkata, is a simple dish of bread and omelette, the loaf is added at just the right time so that the egg sticks to it. Here in Kolkata, we have a sort of mini loaf which comes in a signature yellow casing, the perfect (some would argue “only”) form of bread for this humble dish. It is the ultimate convenience food, prepared within minutes and consumed twice as quickly, a tradition that would continue through my years in Rohtak, where it has been my go-to grab-and-go breakfast: no parathas for me at 8 in the morning, thanks.

After three years of bread-omelette in Rohtak, I visited Farmlore, a farm-to-table restaurant in Bangalore in August this year, a farm-to-table restaurant that served modern Indian food. Course Three of their elaborate ten-course feast was a play on the bread-omelette. A piece of perfectly toasted brioche bread, topped with a mixture of sweated onions, tomatoes and coriander was topped with a foam made with egg and mushroom powder, and blowtorched. It was served with a duo of chutneys, a charred red pepper sauce and a mint sauce, a visual evocation of the tiranga.

The brioche was slightly sweet and perfectly toasted around the edges, the sweated veg provided some bite and packed a ton of flavour, while the light-as-air, slightly smoky egg on top tasted lovely, with the mushroom powder adding a little umami-esque something which made the whole dish taste spectacular. Both chutneys were fresh and balanced out the fatty richness of the eggs and toasted bread. Visually and taste-wise, it was definitely the bread-omelette I’ve eaten countless times, only made so many times better.

From Maa’s Sunday morning dim pauruti to late-night 2-minute bread omelettes to buttery brioche and eggy espumas, the egg and bread duo has been a constant for me, as I’m sure it has been for many others. The egg and bread combination is truly magical, morphing into anything from childhood nostalgia to contemporary indulgence.