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At first glance, you’d be hard pressed to find a cookbook that’s less appropriate for our current moment than chef Maneet Chauhan’s Chaat. It’s a sweeping homage to travel, to eating food in packed train stations, to savoring a tangy-salty-crunchy-soft bite on your way to carry out your many plans, weaving your way through a bustling city, bumping elbows with equally busy people.
For the book, Chauhan traveled around the Indian subcontinent, in order to capture and recreate the vast, incredibly varied flavors of chaat for home cooks. “We wanted to capture how organic all of these dishes are. They are a part of where they come from; they’re not static, there is movement,” she tells me over the phone.
So, when you’re flipping through the cookbook on your couch, planning to travel ten steps to the kitchen (a round-trip journey you’ve repeated ad infinitum throughout the past 340 days), you’d think the book—its pages nearly vibrating with liveliness, its photos saturated with vibrant, dizzying color—would make a mockery of your current dismal life situation. You’d think it would send you into a tailspin about the fact that you haven’t ridden public transportation in a year, haven’t shoved an egg sandwich down your throat while running late to a meeting in months, haven’t traveled outside of your own neighborhood in weeks.
Instead, it offers reprieve. And, for me, it offers one recipe that feels like a lifesaver.
I was maybe on my third consecutive night of scrambled eggs for dinner when I happened upon the recipe for a Ros Omelette in Chaat. In it, an omelet spiced with Kashmiri chile powder and cooked with green chiles and onion gets dressed in a creamy coconut and tomato gravy. Here was an eggs-for-dinner preparation that that inspired me, after a lot of mealtime monotony.
The Ros Omelette involves making just two simple components: The ros, or gravy, begins with coconut oil that you use to soften some chopped onions, tomato, garlic and ginger paste, turmeric, and chile powder. Finally, you stir in coconut paste (often sold as coconut butter in the U.S.) and garam masala and continue cooking until “the smell of coconut perfumes the air,” adding water if needed to give the sauce a loose texture. Pour that over a simply-spiced omelet, top it with crunchy chopped raw onion and a squeeze of lime juice, and it’s ready. Goan street vendors serve the dish with pao—soft rolls that you can swipe through the gravy to sop up the deliciousness.
Chauhan thinks the dish probably originated when someone combined a traditional coastal, coconut-laden sauce with an omelet, a dish which she suspects arrived with Portuguese colonists. “I don’t know who thought of making an omelet and putting it in the sauce, but whoever it is, that person is a genius,” she says. When her restaurant Chaatable in Nashville was open for brunch, the Ros Omelette was one of the most popular dishes.
But, of course, I’ve been eating it alone, cutting the recipe from 10 eggs to just two or three. I make a full batch of the ros, pouring a generous amount over the omelet and then saving a bit to be wiped up with bread or spooned over a little rice.
The omelet feels, in many ways, like the perfect alone food. It’s a meat-free meal that’s still built around a hearty source of protein. I mostly avoid cooking meat when I’m just looking to feed myself, partially with sustainability in mind, partially because too many meat-forward recipes leave me with tons of leftovers, and partially because it’s simply not what I feel like eating when I'm sitting solo at my table or, let’s be honest, on my couch. I love the freedom, in cooking for one, of being able to call cobbled together snacks dinner, because no one is there to tell you otherwise. A plate of roasted vegetables with ricotta and toast is meal enough for me. A bowl of garlic-infused brothy cabbage is a hug when there’s no one there to do the hugging. But the Ros Omelet feels like a step above those other staple solo dinners—it feels as balanced and complete as any main dish, but also feels like the kind of craveable snack I’m always after.
The dish is deeply warming and comforting, slightly sweet from the coconut and onion, savory thanks to the garam masala, and a bit spicy thanks to the ginger and chile. It hits all of those varied textures and flavors that are crucial to chaat. It has zing, and bite—crunchy raw onion, creamy, pillowy-soft eggs. It feels like a special meal—though you’re really just scrambling some eggs and making a sauce.
Chahaun, too, is living in a different world than the one that existed in 2017, when she traveled around India to begin writing the book. The book tour she and her co-author, Jody Eddy, had planned, involving chaat parties across the U.S. upon the book’s release, was cancelled. But, in a way, seeing people experience the cookbook while riding out the pandemic at home has been rewarding: “The most amazing feedback I’ve gotten is that people are able to travel vicariously through the book. It’s so heartwarming,” she says. In that way, Chaat and its creamy, aromatic Ros Omelette are the perfect antidotes for our time.
