Tag Archives: Indian Food

Food and Drink, Global Exchange, Summer 2026

Chocolatey Kichidi: An Adoptee’s Portal to the Past

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By Janaea Eads

If you are what you eat, I am dhal and rice and fried chicken with gravy. Adopted by the daughter of Punjabi immigrant parents and the born-and-raised-in-Kansas son of a World War II veteran, I developed a complex American identity with a love of Indian food and dancing to Bollywood songs, along with mucking out horse stalls and driving a pick-up truck. Because of the many transitions in my life, my memories of life preadoption are hazy. At three years old, I was abandoned at a train station in Pune, India, and brought to a nearby orphanage where I lived for two years. After meeting my adoptive parents in 1999, I moved from a flat in India to Maryland after an arduous five-month journey to complete the adoption process. Since moving to Maryland, I’ve gone to college on Long Island, moved to Kansas, taught high schoolers on a Pacific island, moved to Massachusetts, got married, and bought a house in Massachusetts, where I now live with my husband and dog. Every step of the way, I needed to reinvent myself, building on an unknown foundation. 

This picture was taken during my adoption ceremony with my parents. This picture is from the author’s collection of family photographs.
This is a picture taken after my adoption ceremony. This picture is from the author’s collection of family photographs.
This is a picture of my friends and I enjoying a healthy meal at the orphanage. I am in the bottom right corner. This picture is from the author’s collection of family photographs.

Although many people go through transitions, I found myself constantly renegotiating my identity as a transnational adoptee. Instead of belonging to all the places I have inhabited, I belonged to none of them. I found clarity reading ethnographer Sarah Pink’s theory of seeing physical places as unbounded, rather than fixed. Places from our past are fluid. Like a river, once you step into it, it changes and it changes you. It becomes a part of you. Before reading Pink’s theory, I had not recognized how accessible my past is, especially through food. Through the power of Maryland blue crabs (with Old Bay!), Kansas chicken fried chicken, Long Island bagels with cream cheese and lox, and Massachusetts bar pizza, I remain connected to all the places I have lived and can access my memories of where and who I have been.

While the orphanage in Pune, India, is harder to access due to the time and distance in between, one recipe anchors me to it: Sabudana Kichidi, a savory dish of tapioca pearls, a staple in Maharashtrian cuisine. At the orphanage, I called it “Chocolatey Kichidi” because of its brown color caused by crushed peanuts and spices. I loved Chocolatey Kichidi so much it became synonymous with my name; the two times I visited the orphanage while growing up, the cook would make the dish for me, feeding it to me as she did when I lived there.

To reconnect with my orphanage and my adoptee identity, I recreated Chocolatey Kichidi. To do this, I drew from Jennifer Brady’s ethnographical “Cooking as Inquiry” methodology, which centers food and the body as sites of knowledge that help in exploring identity. From the woman who makes masala peas to remember her mother, a father who is young-at-heart when he barbeques, to the elaborate, ritualistic dessert that one friend loves to make, food and the body while cooking can transport us to a place where we can sense who we are and how we got here. However, Brady’s methodology goes beyond just cooking, so I also talked to my parents about their memories of the orphanage and revisited a photo album the caretakers put together for me. The album has pictures of me with friends as well as notes from the caretakers themselves, wishing me a happy life with my new family. I also went through miscellaneous items my mom collected over the years: letters to camp, a favorite t-shirt, and so much more. Through the gathering of ingredients and memories, I entered the mindset I had as a child, filled with wonder, curiosity, and the fear of inevitable change. Chocolatey Kichidi became a portal that transported me to a place where I could connect my past senses, my evolving identity, and my current wisdom to embrace who I am today. 

Chocolatey Kichidi is a simple recipe but requires some preparation in advance. The necessary ingredients are tapioca pearls, potatoes, peanuts, ginger, green chilis, cumin, curry leaves, and garam masala. The night before cooking the kichidi, I soaked the tapioca pearls until they doubled in size and peeled and parboiled my potatoes. I also toasted and ground the peanuts, leaving some chunky for texture. When the peanuts are added to the tapioca, they coat each pearl and turn them “chocolatey.” The next day, in a skillet, I added cumin seeds, minced ginger, green chilies, and curry leaves. Once all the spices were aromatic, I added the parboiled potatoes and fried them, followed by the peanuts and garam masala. I toasted everything together and added the tapioca to cook until the pearls became translucent. 

Author’s picture of recreation of Chocolatey Kichidi. 

My recreation of Chocolatey Kichidi was delicious; however, the process of cooking was the most enlightening. I imagined the cook crushing peanuts and washing the tapioca pearls like I did, mincing the green chili and ginger while I used my microplane grater. She must have heard the sizzle of the cumin and ginger. And had she also coughed as the green chilis sputtered in the pan? Repeating these actions brought me back to the kitchen of the orphanage. Through mimicking the actions the cook might have taken, I stepped into her body, seeing the dish and myself from her perspective. She put so much effort into feeding us every single day; it truly was a labor of love. It is heartbreaking I do not remember her name. While my intention with recreating Chocolatey Kichidi was to revisit a time and place from my past, I did not anticipate revisiting the people I once knew. With the love and support of the cook and caretakers at the orphanage, I found my adoptive parents. Through them, and Chocolatey Kichidi, I found myself. We are not only what we eat. We are also the places we have been to and the people we meet along the way. 

Works Cited

Brady, Jennifer. 2011. “Cooking as Inquiry: A Method to Stir up Prevailing Ways of Knowing 

Food, Body, and Identity.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 10 (4): 321–34. https://doi.org/10.1177/160940691101000402.

Pink, Sarah. 2015. “Principles for Sensory Ethnography : Perception, Place, Knowing, Memory 

and Imagination.” Doing Sensory Ethnography, 25–50. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781473917057.n2.

      Janaea Eads is a master’s candidate in Boston University’s Gastronomy program. Her research interests include the intersections between adoption, food, and identity. She is also represented by Starling Literary + Media Agency and is currently working on young adult books that center adoptee narratives. When she isn’t writing, cooking, or thinking about food, she is being outsmarted by her pit-mix rescue.

 

Culinary History, Global Exchange, Summer 2026

Grandma’s Savory French Toast

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By Sarita Bhagwat, Chef and Owner of Saffron and Savoir

This is not a story about a French recipe; it is not a story that takes place even remotely near France.  This is a story of an Indian grandmother who passed away 40 years ago, but whose culinary genius and creativity continues to live in our kitchen in Boston, Massachusetts, passed through from her daughter (my mother) to me, to my boys and to my (not so Indian) daughter-in-law!

Savory French Toast.

My grandmother (aji as we called her) passed away when I was 15. But she was the one who first got me interested in cooking, and the idea of delivering love through food. She was tiny, barely five feet, fair skinned, slightly plump, but neat. She always wore ironed, tightly wrapped sarees, showing just a bit of milky white belly underneath the colorful sarees. Aji was an elementary school teacher, but her real passion was cooking. In her tiny kitchen in a Mumbai suburb, she produced delicious dishes that were often ahead of their time.While I fondly remember her curries, it is her innovations like stuffed crabs that continue to motivate me to experiment with food. My grandmother was a firm believer in the healing power of foods.Her spicy fish broth was a cure for nasty summer colds, and most memorable to me, her dried Bombay Duck (a delicate fish found in the waters off Mumbai) rubbed on the eye lid was a cure for pink eye. Food was central to my summer holidays with my maternal grandparents, weaving itself into the fabric of fun, adventure, care and healing.

There are many dishes from my grandmother’s playbook I recreate, but the one that is most popular in my American household is her Savory French Toast. It was a staple at breakfast during my summer holidays, and in my school lunch box. In fact, it is one of the most requested breakfast dishes when my now grown-up boys and daughter-in-law come for a visit to Boston. My kids never met my grandmother, but my mother made this for my kids when she was on babysitting duties. So much did the boys associate this dish with my mother (who herself passed away last year), that they and Katy the daughter-in-law call it “Vidyut’s French Toast”

Now more about this strange delicacy. French toast evokes images of weekend breakfasts, smells of cinnamon, vanilla and berries and brioche soaked in syrup for most. But not for our family.  The idea that French Toast is sweet, and to be eaten with maple syrup is something I learned only after moving to the US as a 20-year-old student in the 1990s. 

Maggi Hot & Sweet Sauce is easily available on amazon and in Asian stores

The French Toast I grew up with, was savory, spicy, cheesy and salty. White bread slices soaked in a batter of eggs, milk, a combination of cheeses, and yes, a spicy green chili and herbaceous cilantro. And no syrup in sight either, we always ate ours with Maggi Sweet and Hot Sauce.* 

I felt as though we had come full circle when, on my recent visit to Washington DC, Ishan and Katy asked me to make Grandma’s French Toast and Katy, with a big grin, took a bottle of Maggi Hot & Sweet Sauce out of her shelf as soon as we sat down to eat!

When you grow up eating certain foods, you don’t think about how unique and special those dishes might seem to an outsider. I realized this when I madeFrench Toast as a chef, while cooking on a remote island in Maine. It was a cold foggy morning, ten women writers were to arrive for a week-long retreat that afternoon. I needed to make a quick brunch for myself and the organizers. I whipped up a stack of “Vidyut’s French Toast” and decided I would take a chance on these folks liking them. And oh boy, did they like them!! They devoured the entire stack, moist and cheesy with parmesan, and spicy with a kick from chopped up green chili. My friend Cintra who was assisting me on this gig accused me of holding out on her for not having cooked these in our 20-year friendship.

Grandma’s Savory French Toast Recipe

Serves 4

Ingredients:

  • 12 slices white bread (white sliced bread is essential)
  • 8 eggs
  • ½ cup whole milk
  • 1 cup grated cheese (any combination of parmesan and gruyere or cheddar)
  • 2 chopped green chilies
  • ¼ cup chopped cilantro
  • Salt, pepper to taste
  • Olive oil or butter

Method

Cut each slice of bread into half, forming triangles or rectangles. Whisk eggs and milk. Add salt, pepper, chilies, cilantro and cheese to eggs and mix well. Pour into a rectangular 9×12 shallow baking dish or pan.

Heat a flat 10-inch frying pan. Add a tablespoon of olive oil or butter or both.

Dip four pieces of bread briefly in the egg mixture so they have a coating on both sides. Make sure each piece has some grated cheese from the mix – it can sometimes sink to the bottom of the pan.

Once oil is heated, put soaked bread pieces on the pan and cook on one side for 2 minutes on medium heat, flip and cook the other side for another 2 minutes or till the edges are brown and egg coating looks golden and crispy. Repeat with the remainder of the bread and egg mixture. Add more oil or butter for each round of frying.

Serve hot with your favorite sauce

Notes:

This recipe is best served immediately but can be made an hour ahead and warmed in the oven or on the frying pan. Using a shallow pan for soaking the bread is essential, otherwise the grated cheese will sink to the bottom of the pan, and you will have an excess amount of cheese on your last pieces of toast.