We proudly own a copy of Hafeez Inayatullah‘s famous book ‘khaana pakaana’ (cooking meals). At first we thought the book was written by a male author named Mr Hafeez, but after reading the preface it dawned on us that author is infact a lady named Ms Hafeez, because she wrote the word ‘raqma‘(female writer) before her name.
After first edition of the book was published, a dejected single male complained to Ms Hafeez that her book doesn’t tell him how to cook eggs. Ms Hafeez immediately paid heed to this important need of single population and 2nd edition of the book now contains 11 priceless recipes on how to cook eggs. Below is an excerpt from the preface where Ms Hafeez explains the reasons of including egg recipes.
The book is great. It is an encyclopedia of recipes. There are 19 recipes of cooking chicken, 17 for rice dishes, 33 for ‘qeema’ (minced meat), 31 for regular meat, 26 for fish and the list goes on and on.
(1) Simple Omelet Number One:
To conserve space and to keep our readership’s suspense intact I’ll share with you only 2 out of 11 egg recipes. The first one is titled: ‘Simple Omelet Number One’. Points to be noted are underlined in Urdu text below. Ingredients include 2 big spoons full of oil. To beat the egg into omelet, author is instructing us to use a fork instead of a spoon. She has also used a word ‘kaR-kaR-aayeN’ which I’ve never heard in Urdu before. It means the oil needs to be heated until it starts sounding like ‘kaR kaR aayeN aayeN’ or just ‘kaR kaR kaR kaR’. This is such a phoenitc invention of a word that I must say this book not only caters to ones stomach needs but also to linguistic thirst. In the last line author gives us a choice to make this omelet in the shape of a fish by flip-flopping it continuously. Now this must be something special. I’ve never eaten an omelet shaped like a fish before. Enjoy :) 
(2) Omelet Number Three:
The recipe’ below is titled as ‘Omelet Number Three’. Ingredients include a little bit of Soda, besides the 4 eggs needed for this type of omelet i.e. the Omelet number three. Under recipe’ instructions, the author asks us to ‘Open the eggs’. Don’t break them ok. Just carefully open them. Drain the white material into a plate but make sure to keep the yolk inside the opened eggs. Now beat the egg-white so much that it turns into foam. Make sure the foam is not temporary. It should remain in foam texture even after the beating is stopped. Now add Soda (the one that is suitable to eat. none other please) to it and blah blah blah. The word ‘kaR-kaR-aayeN’ is used in this recipe’ also. The last couple of lines instruct us to try to make this omelet round as a ball and use low heat. As the heat will start going into the egg it will start getting rounder and rounder. If you want you can make 2 separate round omeletes by repeating the same recipe’ 2 times. The last line reads that the resulting omelet will look very beautiful.
Please feel free to share with us anyother great egg recipes that you may know.
This post brought back a few memories. As a student in London more than three decades ago I had absolutely no experience of cooking until my mother bought me this book during a holiday back in Karachi. After that I’d try out some of the recipes from time to time, and they were very successful. The only change I made was to reduce the amount of cooking fat -at times the book called for whole slabs of butter,whereas I found I could cook meat in its own fat and still produce a very satisfactory result.
Adil
local time is 12:41 pm and after reading your last message has ignited the hunger for ‘khagina’. time to have some omlete and Khagina now. Talk to you in a bit :)
Owais, my friend: Khagina, I know :-). My wife makes that too, and my kids love it. But ‘Aalo Unda-UET style’ is something different… partly becasue you need a microscope to find the Unda, but, magically, the taste is all over! And when you return from a long day in the sun for the surveying class, it is a taste to behold; or, as we used to say then, it is ‘bahishti khabba’.
But you know what, Adnan Ahmad is right. If I had it now I would probably find it culinarily boring and hygenically dangerous. I enjoyed it then because ‘student hunger’ is unlike all other; I enjoy the memory now, well, because that is what nostalgia is all about !
Adil
I like anda-aalo dish too. It is called ‘khagina’.
Adil, It is called “daal ghotaalaa” in karachi. I never had it but my older brothers did and they tell me it was amazing. In fact one of them tried to make it several times during my student years and each time it would turn out to be terrible.. He would then look at my hidden smile and say..”acchaa yaar next time shayad bunn jaayey..” I guess that hunger of student days that made “daal ghotaala” so special never comes back.. even though we like to think it was the dishes that made the difference.