The Cock Crow Meal: How Breakfast Tells The Story Of Urban India| Book Review

Is breakfast Indian, is it at all a meal? Food writer Priyadarshini Chatterjee, who confesses to not being a morning person, takes off on an exploration of what breakfasts mean to the people who eat them and the cities that serve them. In her introduction she traces of the history of the meal which existed in various forms in Greece, Rome and Persia. Originally sneered at by the elite as being the food for rural toilers who could not manage their hunger, it gradually inched its way into the scheme of things as the gaps between mealtimes changed.

Food habits also began to change –congee was replaced by coffee in South India. Breakfast, health reformers believed, needed be reframed and reformulated in such a way as to improve people's digestion and of course, their lives. (And, as wellness culture is wont to do, reframed and reformulated in such a way as to make a lot of money.)

First Bite travels through ten Indian cities breakfast by breakfast beginning with her in-laws’ Amritsar which is an overwhelming sensory experience of chhole and flaky kulchas through eatery after eatery as Chatterjee strives to find words to make each description different and capture the tastes hot off the tandoors. She also writes of the connection between Amritsar and Lahore foodwise and how Partition broke it apart though the tastes remained strong. In the same way she travels through Kolkata, Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kochi, Varanasi, Shillong, Bengaluru and Ahmedabad. One encounters names that one expects in the cities that one knows. Ahmedabad’s historic eateries like the hole in the wall Chandravilas that serve fafda jalebi and more, the Chinese breakfast at Territy Bazaar in Kolkata and the layers that evolved over colonial times, not to mention Shillong’s roadside jadoh shops that serve early morning flaneurs and workers alike.

Chatterjee’s discoveries are not always what one would expect –Varanasi’s dairy culture that nurtures pehelwans for example, or the Shivlingam that evolved from a kichdi. There are many more stories from the different cities and the stories actually serve as a welcome break from Chatterjee’s crafted descriptions of food, peppered with rare 17th century terms, that are delicious but things that the reader cannot eat on the page. There is also a sneak peek at Chatterjee taking antacids for acid reflux as a result of all the fried food – in fact we also have Swami Vivekananda’s strictures against an overload of fried food and sweets which is an unusual discovery.

Chatterjee is very clear that her book is not a recommendation of places to eat but wherever a book has lists, people naturally follow the food trail looking to experience the shop. Some of the ones she lists date from the eighteenth century while others have wound up leaving legends behind.

Chatterjee also looks at how India’s morning meals have evolved over time. She moves from references in ancient texts and ritual offerings to the practical needs of working peopleand then to the growth of public eateries in expanding cities. The public tandoors like the public bakeries gave women a space to come together and exchange news in traditional times in an atmosphere that no one could censure as God’s divine gift of rice gave women in Meghalaya a chance to grow in economic stature as they struggled with their conical baskets up hill and down dale. Her book travels from north down south talking about bibinca in Kochy and a Hyderabadi ruler who ate 40 sers worth of food every day which gave feast like a king a new definition.

Through her abundance of research, she shows how breakfast reflects larger social and cultural shifts, changing with patterns of work, migration and urban life, while still holding on to older traditions. From temple offerings and home kitchens to roadside stalls and old, well-loved eateries, the author follows the morning meal as it travels through lanes, markets and workspaces, capturing how a city slowly comes alive at dawn. The act of eating breakfast is not just about food in this book, but about routine, labour and community , the quiet beginnings that shape and have shaped the day over time.