Arooq

Chicken Mince Fritters

• CuisineIndian
• CategoryChicken
• CourseStarters

Ingredients

• 1 kgChicken mince
• 250 gmsSpring onions, sliced
• 4Green chillies, chopped
• 1 tspChilli powder
• ½ tspTurmeric powder
• 1 tspGround pepper
• 1Egg, beaten
• ¼ cupRaw cashews, ground
• ½ cupBreadcrumbs
• 1 tspSalt
•  Oil for deep frying

Preparation

1. Mix all ingredients
2. Heat oil in a pan for deep frying
3. Pick mixture with a tablespoon, filling half of it and push into the frying pan with another spoon
4. Fry till light brown and remove with a slotted spoon on to absorbent paper

One of the cookbooks I bought a long time ago was Madhur Jaffrey's A Taste of India. It is a great read with chapters devoted to each region in India. In addition, there is a lot of background on the culinary styles of that region. The photographs are great and add to the general atmosphere.

I tried several recipes from that book and have added many of them to my repertoire. With time, the ingredients and the process did tend to drift, often based on my personal tastes and other renditions of the dishes I found on the web. One of the recipes I tried from that book was a dish called Arooq. While I may have fiddled with the ingredients a little, my research on the web on this dish returned several pages - every one of which referred back to Madhur Jaffrey's book. I wonder if this was a family recipe, little known outside the Iraqi Jew community it is said to come from. One site mentioned that it was a Dawoodi Bohra dish but it also referred to the very same book. An obscure but delish dish indeed.