Generously coat the bottom of a large sauté pan or skillet with oil and heat over medium-high heat until the surface shimmers. Reduce the heat to medium.
Working in small batches that won’t crowd the pan nor bring down the temperature of the oil, lightly flour the cutlets, dip them in the egg mixture, then evenly coat with bread crumbs. Fry until golden brown on the outside and cooked through on the inside, 1 to 2 minutes per batch. Place on absorbent paper, and fry the remaining cutlets. Serve hot.
TEA SPECIALS
TEA-MARBLED DEVILED EGGS
This is Sanjay Sharma’s divine take on deviled eggs with an Indian twist and a nod to those ancient teahouse eggs found in China. The results give the outside of the peeled eggs a lovely brown marbling and the filling a powerful combination of balanced flavors. The use of fresh mint here is less a reflection of the traditional Darjeeling kitchen than the influence of Sanjay’s mother. She loved mint’s flavor and added it to many of her dishes. With a large bed of it growing beside the burra bungalow on Glenburn, Sanjay followed suit.
Makes 12 egg halves:
6 large eggs, at room temperature
2 heaped Tbsp loose-leaf strong black tea or 3 or 4 tea bags of black tea
2 Tbsp minced onion
2 heaped Tbsp minced, fresh mint
½ to 1 small green chili, minced
¼ cup/60 ml mayonnaise, preferably Hellmann’s
Salt and freshly ground pepper
Place the eggs in a small saucepan and cover with at least 1 inch/2.5 cm water. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat to medium low, sprinkle in the tea leaves, and gently boil for 9 minutes. Remove from the heat.
Without discarding the liquid, remove the eggs with a slotted spoon, and using the back of a spoon, smack the shells to create webby veinings of cracks. Do not peel. Place in a large bowl.
Let the tea-infused water from boiling the eggs cool for a few minutes, then it pour over the eggs. Allow them to sit in the liquid until completely cooled, at least 1 to 2 hours. Turn the eggs from time to time for even marbling.
Gently peel. Slice in half lengthwise, carefully setting aside the whites. Place the yolks in a mixing bowl.
Add the onion, mint, chili, and mayonnaise to the bowl, season with salt and pepper, and blend with a fork.
Spoon a generous amount of filling into each of the egg halves and mound attractively with the inside curve of a spoon. Arrange on a platter.
DARJEELING TEA SORBET
This sorbet, loosely adapted from Anthony Wild’s The East India Company Book of Tea, is indulgent, even festive, and shows off one of Darjeeling tea’s many culinary possibilities. It can also be prepared in a sorbet or ice-cream maker. Instead of freezing and whisking with a fork as follows, pour the chilled tea mixture into the machine and churn, adding the whisked egg white toward the end of the freezing time.
Makes about 1 quart/1 liter:
3 Tbsp/10 g high-quality loose-leaf Darjeeling tea
¼ cup/50 g sugar
Juice of 1 ripe lemon, about 3 Tbsp
1 large egg white, at room temperature
Place the tea in a large, heatproof teapot. Bring 3 cups/700 ml freshly drawn water to a boil, remove from the heat, let cool for a moment, then pour over the tea. Let infuse for 5 minutes.
Pour the liquid through a fine sieve or muslin bag into a freezerproof mixing bowl. Stir in the sugar, then the lemon juice. Allow to cool.
Once the liquid has cooled completely, place in freezer and allow to freeze. Once the liquid begins to freeze, start frequently scraping the edges of the bowl with a fork or spoon and stirring.
Meanwhile, in a clean bowl, beat the egg white with a mixer over medium speed to soft peaks that are opaque and still moist.
When the liquid is nearly frozen, fold in the egg white and whisk with a fork. Keep in the freezer until ready to serve.
Serve in chilled sorbet glasses.
Store, tightly covered, in the freezer and use within 1 week.
Author’s Note and Acknowledgments
Upon finishing university in the early 1990s, I flew to London and attempted to travel overland to Cape Town. I didn’t make it, and that planned year on the road morphed into four of backpacking around Africa and Asia before I settled down in London to do graduate work. In a litany of exotic places, I discovered the disparate world of tea, learned that it was far more than just a hot drink, and that, in the diverse manners of its preparation and service, it played an integral part in the daily life of many cultures. Perhaps more than anything else those years, I was sustained by numerous daily cups of tea—generally milky, always sweet, often spiced.
I had been on the road for a couple of years when I traveled to Darjeeling and tasted tea itself for the first time: pure and fresh, no sugar, no milk, no lemon, no cardamom or ginger, no black pepper. It was winter, and that week, huddled near an ineffective coal fire in my room at the Planters’ Club, a pot of autumn flush under a knitted tea cozy with fraying threads on a side table, tea warmed me after lengthy strolls around the surrounding tea-covered hillsides (glimpsing, briefly but memorably, Kanchenjunga). The liquor seemed just as bright and fresh as the mountain air.
While over the years I have visited many of the world’s tea-producing areas, none managed to seduce or intrigue me like Darjeeling—the tea itself, the hills, the industry’s history, a garden’s archaic structure, the warmth of the people. I long wondered exactly how and why the tea grown here is, simply, the finest, and why it could not be replicated elsewhere.
To find out, it took closely following an entire harvesting year and spending time on Darjeeling’s gardens during each of the year’s four flushes, from the opening first flush in March to the end of the autumn one in November, watching the tea change with the seasons—and tasting those changes in the cup.
While the book is supported by broad reading and research, the secrets of Darjeeling’s uniqueness were ultimately revealed by hanging out with industry experts in Kolkata and Delhi and, most important, with tea planters, supervisors, pluckers, and tea-factory workers on sixteen Darjeeling estates (and as an anonymous interloper on many others). Accompanying them in the fields among bushes they know intimately, checking tea fermenting on long beds, and joining the ritual of daily batch tastings, I came to appreciate the handicraft nature of Darjeeling tea. But I also learned of the deep and urgent challenges the storied industry is battling.
In researching this book in India I relied heavily on the generosity of others, quite often strangers. I was treated with surprising openness in the secluded, generally private, and often secretive world of Darjeeling tea, welcomed with chaat and biscuits, momos, and full lunches, as countless people generously shared their experience and knowledge. And, of course, tea. There were many hundreds of cups of tea not only in tasting rooms but also to leisurely drink on the verandahs of managers’ bungalows. Afterward, I was inevitably sent on my way with bulging foil packets of tea leaves from the day’s choicest batch, just fired and barely yet cooled, to sustain me between visits.
I would particularly like to thank the following, beginning with people on the estates: Jay Neogi, Krishnendu Chatterjee, and Sumit Jha (Ambootia); Sumit Kumar (Bannockburn); Parminder Singh Bhoi (Castleton); Mukul Chowdhury (Ging); Sanjay Sharma, Husna-Tara Prakash, Jenni Bolton, Darlene Khan, and staff (Glenburn); Ashok Kumar, Prem, and staff (Goomtee); Rishi Saria (Gopaldhara); B. N. Mudgal, S. K. Choudhary, and Shantanu Kejriwal (Jungpana); Shankar Lal Chaudhury (Lingia); Rajah Banerjee, Kuldip Basu, Indrey Sarki, Sanjoy Mukherjee, Nayan Lama, and Maya Chettrini and family (Makaibari); Vijay Dhancholia and Normal Chhetri (Marybong); H. R. Chaudhary (Namring); B. B. Singh and Shiv Saria (Rohini); Satish Mantri (Singbulli); Suman Das (Thurbo); and Rajesh Pareek (Tukvar).