Onion Bhajia

Bhajia (singular bhaji) is Hindi for fried vegetables. In the mostly Bangladeshi restaurants where I eat bhajia, they tend to be deep-fried balls of sliced onion in chickpea flour (besan) batter. There is no better hot appetizer than these crisp, spryly spiced vehicles for partially tamed onion. The word “bhaji” also tells us something about our Indo-European heritage. It derives from the Sanskrit bhrajj, the ancestor also of our word “fry.” In addition to invent