Ghotala

, Kalakki And More: How India Relishes Its Street-Style Anda Recipes

1. Anda Ghotala

This egg recipe can be traced back to the streets of Surat, from where it travelled to Mumbai and Pune food carts as a very popular street food that uses both boiled eggs and a sunny-side-up egg omelette, with an onion-tomato masala. The name itself is part of the joke, with ‘anda’ obviously meaning egg and ‘ghotala’ meaning a mess or a scam, which refers to the three different styles of egg preparations resulting in different textures in one pan. The anda ghotala recipe just takes about five minutes to fix and disappears even quicker, mopped up with a buttery pav.

2. Ros Omelette

Travel southwards, along the same Konkan coast, like Mumbaikars every long weekend, and you will come across the ros omelette. The anda recipe of this special dish is gravilicous, where this Goan breakfast-turned-street-snack drenches a fluffy omelette in a spicy curry. It is the same xacuti gravy used for Goan chicken or mutton preparations since ros or ras means gravy, and omelettes are often served with the leftover gravy from dinner, usually a chicken xacuti, alongside pav.

3. Egg Roll

No egg recipe, in particular, street food carries as much history as the Kolkata egg roll, which is the toned-down version of the city's famous kathi roll. The kathi roll was invented in the first half of the 20th century at Nizam's, a Kolkata restaurant that began as a stall selling kebabs and parathas before becoming a full restaurant in 1932. British patrons didn't want to eat kebabs by hand, so the kitchen started wrapping the skewer-roasted meat in a paratha instead, much like how the Mughals had rumali rotis to wipe their hands, not eat them after a rich meal. The egg rolls just have an omelette fused to the maida-based paratha on the outside, with an onion-chilli sauce or meat filling, at times. 

4. Anda Ghari

Easy to confuse with the anda ghotala recipe, because of shared geography, anda ghari uses a completely different technique, and instead of pre-cooking the eggs separately, whole eggs are cracked into a simmering onion-tomato masala and left to poach in the gravy itself, something reminiscent of the Tunisian shakshuka. The yolks remain runny and the masala quite thick, scooped up with pav, and this egg recipe turns up on Marathi home-cooking blogs just as often as on street food stalls.

5. Mughlai Paratha

One widely repeated account credits a chef named Usman from Bardhaman, Bengal, working in Emperor Jahangir's imperial kitchen, with inventing the iconic Mughlai paratha. What he did was add eggs to a plain keema paratha when the emperor grew tired of the same dish. Needless to say, the emperor loved it, and a variation of this eventually made its way to Kolkata's street food stalls once the city became a colonial capital. You will find the best Mughlai paratha in the weathered cabins of Kolkata, served with sauce, chutney and aloo curry.

6. Kadai Muttai

Perhaps the most peculiar one in this list of egg recipes is the kadai muttai, which does not refer to chicken eggs at all, but quail eggs. Kadai muttai is the Tamil name for quail eggs, tiny, oval-shaped eggs much smaller than chicken eggs, with a distinctive white shell speckled with black or brown spots. Sold by the dozen at roadside carts across Tamil Nadu, especially in Chennai, these eggs are boiled, peeled, and either deep-fried, tossed in a peppery masala, or dunked in a spicy roast. Some sellers also make it into a paniyaram version, which you will notice being cooked like the octopus balls sold by street food vendors in Japan.

7. Egg Kalakki

Introducing another omelette, and if you have been bingeing on omelette recipes or any other recipe on social media where the eggs keep being gathered into the centre with fluffy output, you will love egg kalakki. ‘Kalakki’ in Tamil simply means ‘to mix’, and this egg recipe is a famous street-side food from Coimbatore that has since spread to eateries across Tamil Nadu. Vendors beat the egg with a spoon, then add two spoons of leftover chicken or mutton salna (curry gravy), before pouring it onto a very hot tawa.

How These Egg Recipes Compare

Eggs Hold Their Own Among Street Foods

India's street food economy is built around ingredients that are cheap, quick to cook, and easy to eat while standing, like vada pav. These conditions are met readily by vegetables, lentils and bread, which tend to satisfy easily, but eggs satisfy just as well while adding protein at a fraction of the cost of meat. That's likely why at least one egg recipe will be a speciality of a particular region, some known and some unknown, nourishing hungry hearts and tummies for decades.