Fit for a king: kedgeree is the most regal of all Anglo-Indian dishes

How does the saying go? ‘Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper.’ Well, if you’re looking for the highest possible status of breakfast, then kedgeree is the dish for you. Bran flakes just don’t quite scratch the same itch. Kedgeree cannot be casual; it requires time, both for preparation and enjoying, and it makes breakfast an occasion. It came to our breakfast tables (or mahogany sideboards) in Victorian times, brought back to Britain by returning colonial officers. It was served in silver chafing dishes, set alongside steaming urns of porridge.

Kedgeree is a rice-based dish, flavoured with curried spices and cooked with smoked haddock, onions and boiled eggs. There are a host of other ingredients or accoutrements that can be served in or with it – peas, lime pickle, any herb you can think of – but these are the essentials. It started life as a dish of rice and lentils boiled together, called khichari by Ibn Battuta, the legendary Moroccan scholar and traveller, as far back as 1340. A simple peasant meal, it was adopted by the Mughal royal kitchen as a fasting dish. In the 1600s the French traveller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier came to India and observed Indian soldiers dipping their fingers in clarified butter before eating the dish with their hands.

Alongside mulligatawny and mango chutney, it was one of the Anglo-Indian dishes the British adapted or invented following their time in India in a fit of nostalgia and excitement at the new flavours they had encountered. These dishes weren’t quite the same as in India, but authenticity wasn’t a major concern. They quickly became a staple of British household menus.

Victorian kedgeree was rich, with butter stirred into the dish and cream added. Fish was added to the dish in India, but it was the British who codified that fish as smoked haddock and confined the lentils to history.