Ceci

Eastside Road, February 9, 2012—

OUR FRIEND BHISHMA, easily one of the most intelligent, culturally openminded, and discerning men I've ever met, is also of course a fine bouche, as who with such attributes would not be. Some years ago he sent us a recipe he'd adapted (with very little change) from Madhur Jaffrey's An Invitation to Indian Cooking (Knopf, 1973), and tonight Lindsey made it for dinner.

The ingredients are many, as is so often the case with this cuisine; but a half-dozen of them are spices, and many of the rest are other sorts of flavoring agents. The base is chick peas — ceci or, as they were called in my childhood home, garbanzos. Chick peas can well; the commercially canned ones do fine, though I prefer the purity of concept attached to dried ones.

They're added to a heavy skillet in which you've sweated chopped onions along with cumin, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, coriander, garlic ginger, cayenne, salt, and lemon juice — I told you there were lots of ingredients — and served with chopped tomatoes, raw onion slivers, and, if you have some, green chilies: we did not, tonight.

The dish is delicious and the house smells marvelous. Green salad.

Cheap Nero d'Avola