India’s Most Nostalgic Egg Dish Is Made on a Train

About halfway through the 2014 film, The Hundred-Foot Journey, comes a defining moment. The protagonist, young Indian cook Hassan Kadam (played by Manish Dayal), wants to prove himself to the very French Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren), a Michelin-decorated chef who turns her nose up at the curry-making family who’ve moved in across the street. He decides to show her his skills by making an omelet. Except, because his own hands have been burned after his family's restaurant was torched by one of Mallory's employees, he will have to walk her through the recipe. She accepts his offering of an olive branch.

What follows is an awkward dance of cultural unraveling. First, she’s coaxed into gentle stirring instead of a practiced whisking. Then, as she haltingly adds pinches of spice, onion, chile, and coriander, she’s nudged by Hassan to drop it all in. The omelet is—despite her intransigence—eventually poured, cooked, folded, and served. Mallory takes a bite, gasps “Oh,” and bursts into tears.

Outside, the sun has broken through—and the "Indian omelet" has, it would appear, brokered a truce.

An Indian omelet is essentially a masala omelet, different from regular omelets in that it packs in both a generous amount of finely diced vegetables and considerable heat from various spices. Versions of masala omelet are conspicuously available anywhere you go in India, but for me, nowhere does it reign more supreme than in my memories of childhood—of long train journeys ventured in hot summers. The great Indian railway omelet.

If you spent any time growing up in India, and if you took pleasure in traveling its length and breadth like my family did, then this omelet was a companion to your coming of age. Train stations would shift and food vendors would change, but the “railway omelet,” or “bread omelet” as it was sometimes called, stayed bafflingly consistent.

It broke all the strictures of traditional omelet-making, but it was the kind of exception that for me became the rule: thin, flat, pale to the point of sickly, large enough that it would flop over the edge of your plate, and liberally flecked with chile powder and peppers, onions, and coriander. Oftentimes it was a sandwich filling, folded up and bursting out of two slices of white bread, usually toasted in the grease of the pan.

Indian Railway Omelette Sandwich

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Despite our regular train travel, railway omelets were a treat that didn’t always come easy. My mom would pack homemade food for us to carry: a hierarchy of meals and snacks packed in order of consumption. We’d start from the top—flaky, crumbly curry puffs perhaps, and end with idli miligai podi. For reasons I cannot fathom today, I’d look longingly at kids whose less-prepared mothers would hand them crumpled notes instead, to buy from the vendors plying the train’s corridors snacks that were always greasy, always messy. To me, though, they held the appeal of contraband.

Eventually our food would run out, about midway through a 40-hour journey from the dusty heat of northern India to the tranquil green of Kerala. I’d retreat to the upper bunk for the night, waking several times to shadowy figures getting on and off the train, the calls of chai and coffee eventually announcing the morning. Then they’d arrive—the omelets—in bucketfuls from the dining car. If you’d placed an order for one ahead of time, a flat, cold, delicious omelet with buttered bread was yours.

To be clear, omelets weren’t the only food that’d emerge. But in my pile of priorities, the omelet sat right at the top, with potato cutlets a distant second. At the very bottom of the pile, the stainless-steel trays containing multiple sloshing curries, rice and "cardboard papad."

The omelets I really loved were the ones you jumped off the train for, at some obscure town in middle-India—a halt just long enough for you to leap back on board in time. (My mother was never thrilled with this idea, and lectured me about levels of hygiene, which I cared less for.) Stretching my legs, I’d take in the details of the platform, rich as a novel with its swirling universe of passengers, well-wishers, and hawkers. I’d watch the vendor throw a medley of veggies into an egg mix and pour it all into a giant pool of grease. The omelet would then be deftly folded into quarters and stuck between bread, or round-top pav, depending on the reach of machine-cut bread in the town.

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“I have vivid memories of these, as happy alternatives to bony chicken curry or bland dal-chawal (lentils and rice) on long trips down to Chennai when I was a kid,” Vikram Doctor, a food writer for India’s Economic Times, writes to me via email. “In fact,” he adds, “rail journeys like that might have been the way kids encountered omelets for the first time.” For many Indian households, omelets would have been less conspicuous on daily menus—except among certain communities like, say, the Parsis—than, say, boiled eggs or egg curries.

In fact, as Tejal Rao writes in her New York Times ode to the Kejriwal—another stellar union of egg, chile, and toast—for many vegetarian Indians, “the egg occupies an interesting position. Not meaty enough to be considered meat but not vegetal enough for everyone to agree that it’s vegetarian.” A train journey was often considered as good a time as any for a vegetarian to condone an omelet’s guilty pleasure.

Later years would find me enjoying similar omelets on street corners—mostly in Mumbai, but also other Indian cities. “Nothing matches the hot, greasy, spicy delight of an omelet sandwich made in front of you out on the street with a cold wind blowing in the few weeks of what Mumbai calls winter,” writes Doctor, in a story about Mumbai's omelet-pav sandwiches. (Those late-night omelet pavs, I can testify, also served as a reliable antidote to hangovers.)

Other great egg sandwiches flourished all over the city: British-style egg butties, and finely sliced boiled egg sandwiches served in gymkhanas with Maggi sauce. But somehow, nothing ever quite matched my palate memory of those omelet sandwiches I ate years before.

I’ve recreated a version in my New York kitchen, and it’s become a Sunday self-care ritual of sorts. The veggies I choose to include vary—sometimes I’ll add tomato, other times, green pepper. Often, I’ll add grated mature cheddar. But one thing’s a constant: I always toast my bread in the same pan. (If you like your bread more evenly browned and crisped, you might prefer a toaster.)

Life appeared to come full circle when I discovered a “Railway Omelet” on the breakfast menu of Pondicheri, a pan-Indian restaurant in New York’s NoMad. Their version, rather more maximalist than the one I grew up with, arrived packed to the gills with veggies, something I popped over to ask owner Anita Jaisinghani about. “It always amazed me how the first thing you tasted in an omelet on the train were the veggies, and not the egg,” she says. “We decided to take that idea a step further and threw in even more—basically everything but the kitchen sink.”

Now that I live so far away from India, I spend a lot of time thinking about how nostalgia shapes memory—food memory, especially. And it makes me wonder about my outsized fondness for the railway omelet sandwich.

Of course I know it isn’t just about the omelet. It’s about straddling two homes as an immigrant, and wanting to preserve the past so that I can cling on to a sense of belonging. Or maybe I just miss the simplicity of travel in those days, when travel, well … took its time. We travel faster and farther now, but we rush about it, hating it all, and complaining endlessly. And whoever rhapsodizes about an airport meal?

But on those leisurely 40-hour journeys, we were armed with only a vague sense of destination. So we read voraciously, slept a great deal, woke up to exquisite dawns and stared out at unexceptional towns. And as the train trundled on, piercing through the heart of India, the spicy, greasy, often cold omelet sandwich kept us company.

What's the most nostalgic food you associate with travel? Tell us in the comments below!

Indian Railway Omelette Sandwich

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Ingredients

4	large eggs
1	tablespoon whole milk
1/2	medium onion, peeled and finely chopped
2	green chiles, seeded and finely chopped
2	sprigs cilantro, finely chopped
1/4	teaspoon black pepper
1/4	teaspoon chile powder (you can also use red pepper flakes)
1/4	teaspoon ground turmeric
1	pinch kosher salt
1	splash vegetable oil or ghee
4	slices white bread or pav

4	large eggs
1	tablespoon whole milk
1/2	medium onion, peeled and finely chopped
2	green chiles, seeded and finely chopped
2	sprigs cilantro, finely chopped
1/4	teaspoon black pepper

1/4	teaspoon chile powder (you can also use red pepper flakes)
1/4	teaspoon ground turmeric
1	pinch kosher salt
1	splash vegetable oil or ghee
4	slices white bread or pav