Home › Meats and Entrees › Kedgeree
Kedgeree
(England.) Soak 1 pint of split peas overnight, drain them, add 1 pound of rice, salt, pepper, and 1/2 a teaspoonful of ginger. Stir and cover with 1 quart of water. Stir and cook slowly until done and almost dry. Make into a mound, garnish with fried onions and sliced hard-boiled eggs.
This is kedgeree in its older, meatless sense — closer to Indian khichri than to the smoked-haddock breakfast dish most people picture. The recipe is sound but the quantities and the cooking order need attention.
- Cook the peas firstSplit peas, even soaked overnight, take 40-60 minutes to soften, while rice is done in 20. Simmer the drained peas until they are nearly tender before the rice goes in, or you will have either chalky peas or collapsed rice.
- The water is shortOne quart for a pound of rice plus a pint of soaked peas will not see the dish through. Reckon on roughly twice the volume of liquid to rice, adding more hot water as it is absorbed, and stop when the grains are tender and the pan is almost dry.
- Scale of the recipeA pound of rice and a pint of dried peas is a large dish — eight to ten servings. Halve it for a household of four.
- The gingerThis means dried ground ginger, not fresh root. Half a teaspoon across this quantity is a background warmth rather than a flavour you will name; a full teaspoon is closer to what a modern palate expects.
- SaltNone is quantified. Salt the cooking water at about a teaspoon per quart and correct at the end, since the peas absorb a good deal.
- Don't stir it to pasteThe instruction to "stir" belongs to the early stage, before the rice softens. Once the grains have swelled, leave it alone and let it steam under the lid, or the starch turns the mound into porridge.
- The garnish is the dishFried onions and sliced hard-boiled eggs are not decoration here — they supply the fat, sweetness and richness the peas and rice lack. Fry the onions slowly to a deep brown and use more than seems necessary.
Kedgeree comes from khichri, the rice-and-pulse dish eaten across the Indian subcontinent, whose name is generally traced to Sanskrit khicc invalid. European travellers were describing it from at least the seventeenth century, and British households in India adopted it wholesale; the version that came home to Britain gradually acquired flaked smoked fish, cream and curry powder, and settled onto the Victorian breakfast sideboard as a chafing-dish standard. What is interesting about this entry is that it preserves the older, fishless form — pulses, rice, a little ginger, eggs and fried onions — while filing it under "England." The split peas take the place of the dal used in Indian versions of the dish.