The Bargain Bhaji

London in the mid-1980s was a crash course in East Asian culture for a girl like me. The universe was Thatcherite; the city reeled under economic stagflation, an AIDS crisis, and a resurgence of neo-Nazi extremism. But there was one bright side: Every corner minimart had a pile of samosas and bhaji on its front counter; you could eat for pennies. A young Indian housewife named Perween Warsi had started making curries and dals at her kitchen table with a bevy of friends, a business she eventually parlayed into a contract with Safeway and a multimillion-dollar company (she´s now the richest Asian woman in Britain, with a CBE from the Queen). As long as you knew how to heat up the plug-in electric burner and the toaster oven provided in your closet-sized, hideously expensive ¨bed-sit,¨ you could pick up, for a dollar or two, a frozen vacu-sealed bag of mung beans or black-eyed pea dal, a mixed-vegetable curry, and a bag of chapatis and you´d have a meal fit for a Mughal.

You couldn´t walk a block in North London without finding a Punjabi restaurant or a poster for Hanif Kurashi´s latest gay-Paki film, My Beautiful Laundrette (the ´80s cultural equivalent of Zadie Smith´s White Teeth). I learned to love the rustic, spicy, gloriously fattening comfort foods incorporating exotic ingredients I´d never heard of: jaggery, ghee, garam masala, asafoetida, fenugreek, lassi drinks laced with cumin and black salt (which, inexplicably, was actually pink). When I came home to the States a few years later, I´d had enough of the terrible weather, the pub bombings, the street grime, the grotesque housing prices. But I really missed Indian food.

In one way or another, I´ve been looking for it ever since, and the Hindu-Sikh celebration of Diwali this month seemed like a good opportunity for exploration. Indian restaurants and groceries in my neighborhood have come and gone — the spice shop on Dixie Highway where I used to buy my turmeric has morphed into yet another Cuban sandwich bar. If I have to drive 30 minutes for my fix of rogan josh, such is my fate.

¨Indian¨ cuisine around here generally means Punjabi with a dash of Bengali; that´s like saying American cooking consists of fried chicken, okra, and pecan pie. You won´t find many South Indian dosas on local menus, the pork and duck of Goa, or the pink rice, banana leaves and complex fish dishes of the coasts. Even so, I´m partial to the buffet lunch at Taj in Deerfield Beach that features a lineup of the old Punjab-Bengali standbys, because you can sample so many different dishes for just $8.95. On a recent Tuesday afternoon, I filled two plates: sag paneer of spinach and homemade cheese; the creamy spiced peas and potatoes called alu matar; eggplant bharta; vegetable korma with cream, tomatoes, and raisins; channa masala; three kinds of chicken; onion bhaji doused in more cream and yogurt sauce; sweet pickled potatoes, coleslaw, and yogurt-cucumber dahi raitha; and a katchumbar salad of spiced onions, tomatoes, and cucumbers. Plus fruit chutney, hot sauce, and the intensely salty pickled vegetables whose flavor sends me reeling back to my old Highgate bed-sitter, like an East-Asian version of Proust´s madeleine. As if all this weren´t bang enough for your buck, you also get a big basket of bread hot off the griddle — dense, smoky naan lightly blackened on the outside and two wonderful puffballs of fried poori. For dessert, that mouthful of milk and honey called gulab jamon and a dish of pure, cool delectability — rice pudding with slivered almonds and pistachios.

You´d pay several hundred dollars with a passel of guests to get this much variety at dinner. So when you go to Taj for an evening meal, you must make decisions. We tried to, over a plate of crispy lentil papadam, stimulating and peppery, with a dish of pungent, sulfurous onion chutney; we dithered; we backtracked; we changed our minds and finally gave up in defeat. Our waiter, though, wasn´t so irresolute; he insisted we have the saag chicken ($13.95) and lamb bhuna ($13.95), the Taj special appetizer ($8.95), some garlic naan ($1.95), and an onion kulcha ($2.95) stuffed with onions and coriander and baked in the tandoor oven. We sank back into our leatherette booth, beneath the elephant-god Ganesh statue and the carved wooden screens, passive and grateful.

Taj´s food is so delicious that the memory of it makes my toes curl. Onion bhajis ($3.95) come out of the fryer meltingly soft and greaseless; they dissolve in your mouth. The special appetizer plate offers luscious, warm mini-samosas stuffed with potatoes and peas; fragrant chunks of chicken tikka; and a seekh kebab made from minced pressed ground beef laced with herbs.