Cheesy chilly toast in Latur

That day arrived in Latur. Scanning the menu, I spied it. Chilli Cheese Toast. Only the world’s bestest snack.

On a hard, intense shoot over days, four of us, made our way from Bombay to Pune to Latur. Food, real food, as in big on delicious, flexible on hygiene local shops, is one of the great pleasures of such travels. We ate our way through thin, spicy mutton curries and bhakris, biryanis with a boiled egg in their tummies,golden yellow tambda rassa, dalcha and Nilanga rice for Rs 10, a divine drink called Bajirao Mastani, its flavours fluorescent, reminiscent of very cold Energee at Aarey stalls in Bombay summers. Finally though, a day arrives when your exhaustion is deep and your tongue craves familiarity over adventure. That day arrived in Latur. Scanning the menu, I spied it. Chilli Cheese Toast. Only the world’s bestest snack.

I am devoted to chilli cheese toast and I am also a fundamentalist in the matter of chilli cheese toast. I am not sure I can be friends with people who don’t like chilli cheese toast. Look, chilli cheese toast really should have only: grated processed cheese, green chillis medium chopped and white bread. I’ll concede to a little dhaniya patta. Some people add chopped onions and a beaten egg. Chalo I am willing to go that far. Kissan tomato ketchup was and remains a must as accompaniment. 

It is a form of everyday genius, this jaunty snack that knowsthat chilli loves cheese like gin loves tonic, that sensuality, a little bit of self melding with a little bit of other, is the key to good fusion food. The sharp chilli bites your tongue, the plump salty cheese caresses it, and so it can go on infinitely, a sweet lick of tomato sauce keeping the excitement fresh. 

The best chilli cheese toast I ever had was at Samovar, the café inside the Jehangir art gallery, where gawking students, famous artists and almost-movie stars flocked for beer and keema parathas. Close was the chilli cheese toast at Sea View, that glorious verandah on Juhu beach, where the sharp-velvety snack heightened your experience of the sunset, the beer, the surging phantasmagoria of the evening beach crowds and ferris wheels and flute sellers playing pardesi pardesi jananahin. Here, too, gangly students, trans folks from the beach, film directors and writers sat side by side, like chillis and cheese. Neither place, with its affordable enjoyments, exists anymore.

According to Vir Sanghvi, chilli cheese toast was invented by Satish Arora, Executive Chef at the Bombay Taj in the 1970s. If true, it’s delightful. Bombay’s working class created bhelpuri which traveled from the streets to the skyscrapers. The favour was repaid by chilli cheese toast traveling from the Taj to everyone’s OTG. Rishta bana rahe as they say no longer.

But, because the path of true lust does not run smooth, everywhere you go chilli cheese toast is now served as if it is ashamed of its inner, cheerful mixed Indian self. Stuffed with mayonnaise, oregano, bell pepper (a pox on bell peppers) and a bazillion other things, it has become the Ambani wedding of snack food, bursting with self-importance.

So, it seems important to keep searching for chilli cheese toast in its core, joyfulform somehow. With hope and trepidation, I ordered it in Latur. And I found it. Yes, a little bell pepper lurked within, but kuch paane ke liye kuch khona padta hai. I ate it every day.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at  [email protected]

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