Potted histories: kedgeree - Telegraph Food always reflects the culture it was born in. There's no dish for which this is truer than kedgeree. Delicately spiced rice, hard-boiled eggs, smoky fish and butter- this is a culinary fight to the death between Indian flavours and Victorian nursery food. It's no wonder, then, that it was created in the melting pot of the British Raj. One line of thought is that the dish is based on a traditional Scottish recipe, which absorbed the flavours of the Indian subcontinent when Scottish troops were sent there in the 1800s. But the more popular theory is that it is a colonial version of the South Asian dish khichrī, a simple mix of rice and legumes that dates back to the 1300s. Khichrī is considered a comfort or sick person's food in Asia, being low in heat and rather easier on the digestive system than a vindaloo. So it was a match made in heaven for spice-shy Britons abroad, one whom in 1793 dubbed it the locals" "delightfullest food" (The British passion for a spicy curry and a few Cobras on a Friday night was, clearly, a long way off.) But the British are rarely content to leave a foreign recipe untweaked, and you can't build an empire without protein. So the colonials added fish and eggs and embraced it as a breakfast dish. When the time came to return to Blighty, they packed the recipe for this early example of fusion food alongside their linen suits and tiger skins. Thousands of crestfallen cooks from London to the Lake District were told that porridge was off the menu. Novel and inoffensive to corseted Victorian ladies with fussy appetites, kedgeree soon became an indispensable part of the 19th century breakfast table. What's fascinating however, is how much these early recipes differ - not only from the kind of kedgeree we eat today, but even from eachother. Today, most recipes call for smoked haddock but in India the fish used would probably have been fresh: fish deteriorates quickly in heat, which is why such dishes were often consumed at breakfast. On top of this, most early references suggest not haddock, but leftover cooked fish of any type - explaining, perhaps why the thrifty middle class embraced the meal so readily. As David Burton points out in his book The Raj at the Table, it was probably only when Scottish smoked haddock became readily available nationally that it became a go-to ingedient for the kedgeree aficionado. And while some cooks chose to celebrate the dish's Asian roots by adding spices - though they often opted for the rather un-Indian sounding Cayenne pepper - many more made a plainer dish, suitable for British tongues. In Mary Harrison's 1884 tome, The Skilful Cook, the only condiments recommended are salt and pepper - in skilfully judged quantities, of course. Even the most mundane component, egg, has been subject to a drastic makeover. Today, we tend to serve the dish artfully strewn with halved or quartered hardboiled eggs, but Elizabeth Acton's 1845 recipe calls for the cook to "stir the kedgeree constantly over a clear fire until it is very hot: then mingle quickly with it two slightly beaten eggs" - creating a peculiar eggy sauce not unlike that used in a spaghetti carbonara today. Other Victorian cooks did use hardboiled eggs, but opted for a fussy, Master Chef-esque presentation. The white of the hardboiled eggs was sliced and the yolk rubbed through a sieve to yield a kind of eggy shower: no doubt bound to impress hungover guests at your country mansion. During the Second World War, kedgeree was embedded enough in the British culinary imagination to be featured in one book as a recommended recipe to cook with rationed food. But, due to the shortage of fish, a clever substitute was suggested - devilled kidneys. Thankfully, "kidnegeree" never took off.