There is something about Delhi before 9 am that I have always loved. Before the traffic reaches its familiar crescendo and the city slips into the frenzy that defines most of its waking hours, breakfast has already claimed its streets. Giant kadhais bubble with hot oil as another batch of bedmi is lowered into them, tea vendors pour endless cups of chai from kettles that have been on the boil since dawn, office-goers gather around carts for a quick bite before work, and neighbourhood regulars settle into the same stalls they have been frequenting for years.
Every locality wakes up to a different breakfast, yet together they form one of the city's most enduring rituals.
If you were to ask me which is my favourite meal of the day, I would say breakfast without pausing to think. It has always been my most indulgent meal, the one that sets the tone for everything that follows. During Delhi's brief winter, or on rain-soaked mornings, my Punjabi heart instinctively reaches for stuffed parathas with home-churned white butter and thick curd; when summer arrives, I find myself craving poha, sabudana khichdi, buttered toast with eggs, upma, or soft idlis with coconut chutney. Then there are Sundays and festive mornings, when breakfast stretches into brunch over Bengali shaada aloo, freshly fried luchis and, because some traditions deserve to be honoured, a rasgulla on the side.
Perhaps that is why I was so drawn to my friend Priyadarshini Chatterjee's debut book, First Bite: Breakfast Stories from Urban India. At first glance, it appears to be a book about breakfast, but it soon reveals itself as an examination of migration, labour, class, memory and survival, using the morning meal as its point of departure.
As Chatterjee says, "The way we understand breakfast today is not how everyone understands the morning meal." In a country as socially and culturally layered as India, there can never be a singular breakfast culture because food habits are shaped as much by circumstance as by tradition. What one eats in the morning is often determined less by preference than by the demands of the day ahead.
Delhi illustrates this better than perhaps any other city. Much of its breakfast landscape has been shaped by migrants who arrived carrying recipes from elsewhere and adapted them to new lives in the capital. The kachori vendor balancing his business on a bicycle, the idli seller outside a metro station, the tea stall serving construction workers and delivery riders, the bread omelette cart outside colleges; each represents a breakfast economy rooted in practicality rather than performance. These are meals designed to fill stomachs, sustain long working hours and remain affordable.
Even some of the breakfasts we instinctively associate with Old Delhi have stories of migration embedded within them. Nagori halwa, bedmi puri and several of the neighbourhood's beloved vegetarian breakfast staples are believed to have travelled with halwais and confectioners from places such as Varanasi and Kannauj before becoming inseparable from Delhi's culinary identity. Like so much of the city's food, they belong here not because they originated here, but because generations of migrants made them part of Delhi's everyday life.
So while breakfast may always be my favourite meal, it has also become my favourite way of reading a city. In Delhi, the first meal of the day is never just about what is on the plate; it is about the people, places and histories that brought it there.
