I ate an Iraqi breakfast that touched my heart.

There are some meals that are so simple, yet they become so incredibly meaningful just because they spark off some long-lost memory that you didn’t even know you had. An Iraqi lamb and egg breakfast at Bait Al Baghdadi did that for me yesterday.

The eggs had been scrambled with salty minced lamb and chopped tomatoes, with the usual serving of fresh vegetables and pickled torshi on the side. I’m well aware that this is something you could easily whip up at home. But hear me out.

The meaty egg scramble was so delicate, it was almost like forking a tender tartare off of the plate. After every few bites of cottony scramble would dissipate in my mouth, I’d chew off an end of a raw spring onion or a peppery span of fresh rocket leaf, the pungency somewhat of a natural mouth cleanser, that would make the next bite of soft lamb and eggs taste new again, like the first bite—always the most alert and expectant bite—all over again.

At its core, the breakfast was nothing more than a muddy mess of eggs, lamb and tomatoes strung together with the faintest trace of oil, maybe a few specks of black pepper rising up from the warm toned hash below. But the saltiness and deep meatiness of the lamb pushed the dish over from something I was merely shovelling down my throat, into something that transported me back to eating breakfast in a village, in the middle of winter. It was such a specific sensory memory, I could almost feel the cold air prick the tip of my nose even though there was nothing but grey Dubai heat steps outside the restaurant entrance.

Yet, the memory was vague in location.

Did the flavours remind me of my mother’s Shiite hometown in India, where food was distributed to everyone in the gated religious town by the religious community chefs? Where the smell of oil and meat always lurked about in the morning air, ready to be tugged at and thrown into a hot industrial-sized frying pan? Or did it remind me of the ear-numbing cold that I had experienced as a child when visiting Iraq? Did it remind of Karbala, a place of which I have no memories except the biting winds that may or may not have whooshed the smells of a comforting meat and eggs scramble from an Iraqi home nearby, sealing them into my frozen constricted lungs, only to be thawed twenty years later? I don’t know. I couldn’t quite place what was making me so sentimental. But something about the rustic simplicity of the dish whisked me back in time, to a time my senses had still kept preciously bookmarked, but that my mind had shut away and replaced with revised volumes of adulthood.

I don’t know if the dish would move you the way it transported me. It may not. It may just be an ordinary egg and lamb mash that you’d want to smash in my face for creating such a big brouhaha about. But here’s a dirty little secret about my blog: my opinions on this blog are as objective as are the childhood experiences, the homely meals, the family vacations, and decades of personal experience I wear as thick-rimmed spectacles over my taste buds.