The Well-Fed Bong

Stranded in New York far from ingredients and helpers, I learned to make quite a few Bengali dishes on the quick, none more successful than bhapa mach – this translates to the somewhat pedestrian "steamed fish" Its got a short ingredient list, quick prep and (horror of horrors) can be made in a microwave without any side effects and looks, as you can see, quite spectacular – one can easily imagine it the fruit of long labour and extensive technique. Yesterday, I needed to produce something to compete with Sunanda's world-class tiramisu, feed friends and impress people, so this was resurrected, adjusted to frozen prawns ( chingri ) rather than fresh fish, and voila! Shorshe Bhapa Chingri , double quick. The process is pretty much the same as bhapa fish – an old blog post I strongly encourage you to read. Its got all the theory, I'll just describe the twists that got me to this one. Ingredients Prawns: super-jumbo-tail-on, why not Mustard: Colman'...

I'm always excited about new Bengali restaurants in Mumbai, and fast expanding Kolkata chain Bhojohori Manna has been on my radar for a while now. Initial negative reviews from a trusted friend had dissuaded me from making the journey to Oshiwara; a visit had thus to wait for me to venture nearby on another excuse. Finally, on rainsoaked noon a few days ago, the eponymous song already having been played on iPod, Sunanda and I stepped into the large, empty restaurant. I'll make the review brief. Bhojohori Manna , if it can continue without any more dental troubles has overtaken Bijoli Grill at the top of my Bengali restaurant choices in Mumbai. With the exception of a somewhat disappointing posto'r bora and a disastrous rajbhog , the food was wonderful. Ethereal luchis , stunning cholar dal , a beautiful daab-chingri , lip-smacking shukto , sublime nolen-gur ice cream - there was much to like on the menu. Places like Oh Calcutta are scared of too much authenticity an...

I'm happy to say my Kosha Mangsho has improved the second time around. Here are the key changes More onions, and sliced rather than diced. There seems to be no situation in the kosha mangsho universe where too much onion is a concern. I finally added twice as much onion as meat, by volume. Sliced, I find, gives better texture - diced just meekly melts away. Dahi in the marinade, along with some green chilli paste. Green chillies give a more predictable, front-of-the-mouth heat. The last time, I had just ginger and salt in the marinade. More badi elaichi (black cardamom) - I tried just one for a kilo the last time, this time I upped it to three. Black cardamom is a powerful spice (on the rowdy side, if you ask me) but mutton seems more than capable of standing up to it. Gur instead of sugar. All that onion is going to be a little bitter when slow-roasted, so the sweetener keeps things from getting unpleasant. Gur is suitably gourmet, what with its organic roots and all, but s...

I admit, my kosha mangsho comes out good, but not great. In any case, I made some yesterday. It turned out meltingly tender and more than edible but the drawbacks as I see it are – not enough of that clingy gravy and somehow just not that dark rich brown. Good enough, but good enough is not good enough. Kosha Mangsho which to all real Bongs will mean goat mutton (not chicken, and definitely certainly absolutely not lamb) is basically a variant of bhuna ghosht or braised mutton. You cook it slow, and do not add any water. The spicing is fairly standard: bay leaf whole red chillies, as many as you can bear whole bong-style garam masala (relax, its just clove, cinnamon, cardamom and black cardamom in suitably mysterious proportions) ginger, paste or diced dhania, jeera, red chilli, turmeric paste two large potatoes, halved a little jaggery (or sugar) The body of the gravy is from onions (lots of them – I used three medium onions to a kilo of meat...

Pheesh Phrai (fish fry to the rest of you plebs) was left to us (along with pheesh chop , pheesh cutlet , Enid Blyton, Victoria Memorial and other cool stuff) by the British. This simple crusty brown rectangle is one of the things guaranteed to produce mild glazing to ocular orbits of bongs everywhere, not to mention uncontrolled salivation and the urge to lick ones lips. Bread (and thus crumb) is phoren to Bengali food and bonelessness of fish practically a sin; fish fry is thus rarely made at home by the well brought up Bengali boudi .It has always been a guilty pleasure, associated with the forbidden roadside stall, the fancy cocktail party or that other great Bengali culinary event - the wedding feast; no bong is truly married unless every dhoti-clad guest has stuffed himself silly with first rate pheesh phrai . The basic genuine fish fry a bhadralok will consider worthy of mauling in his the true-bong accent is a crumb-fried fillet of bhetki , accompanied by a blazingly zingy ka...

Some time ago, I decided to impress Sunanda by cooking for her. So I decided, what better than to lean on my heritage? I dont quite remember why but vegetarian was a requirement so much of my standard repertoire had to be put aside. Not to be deterred, I dug deep and real-Bengali dishes bori dyie kacha posto, kumro bhapa, chhanar dalna and bati chochhori were lined up. The cooking went well (I’m not telling you how the rest of the evening went) but as a special touch, with a little help from the impressee, I decided to pretty things up before wolfing it down. Square plates, some coriander, a bit of cookie cutter magic (I use it to press the rice into nice shapes) and the deep golden colour of raw mustard oil helped out. Here are the recipes Bori Diye Kacha Posto Bori ( vadi for all the other Indians) are dried lentil cakes. The most common lentil for vadi is urad , but this recipe uses the moong variety, small hershey-kiss shaped thingies that fry up to a nice crunch. Po...

For the rest of India, saag is usually the ingredient in a curry, such as saag gosht or saag paneer but the true-blue Bengali raises his left eyebrow every so gently with disdain at such pulverized, spiced and curried stuff. Saag to us is shaag – fresh greens and minimal fussing around with. And the Bengali munches through a lot of different shaags - laal , pui, palak, note and others that are mostly out of reach unless from your own garden. One shaag that is, however, easy to get nearly everywhere (even in the USA, where Indian groceries sell a perfectly usable frozen version) is methi shaag or fenugreek leaves. It also happens to be one of my favourite shaags, and to top it all is, as you can all see below, extremely photogenic. Methi shaag has some characteristic differences from other Bengali shaag recipes; firstly there are no spices (methi is quite a strong flavour in itself). Also, it uses peanuts, which is not that common in Bengali food otherwise. And its a bachelor’...

The end of summer is traditionally Hilsa feasting time in Bengal, but things are much more muddled in Mumbai. In any case, O Calcutta announced the Hilsa Festival in August, and we promptly started salivating. There’s nothing like a bit of independence to inspire the Bengali bhadralok to a feast, so we headed into Tardeo’s innards on the very next day – Sunday, August 16 2009. This OnlyFish-turned-OCalcutta tucked away in a shady-sounding Hotel Rosewood in the bylanes of Tardeo is my favourite in the now humungous chain that Anjan Chatterjee has built, but it turned out to be firmly in the middle of a renovation. The restaurant was still open, though now it was tucked away in what must have been a conference room at the same shadily named hotel. There were, however, plenty of displays announcing that the hilsa we were after was definitely on the menu. Basically, the festival was six different preparations of hilsa; what the Frenchophiles among us call entrees. Of course fried hils...

Kolkata, I discovered on my last trip, is full of Bengali food. No, I'm not an idiot. Till not so long ago, Bengali wasn't on the menu if you wanted to eat out in Kolkata. Chinese they did, Continental they kind of did, Italian, Punjabi, South Indian all check but Bengali; there you had to be nice to your grandmother or persuade someone to get married (not to you though, the bride and groom don't get to eat anything at a wedding). Bengali snacks and sweets clogged every nook and corner, individual dishes (such as kosha mangsho) was available in places but a full Bengali meal had always been out of reach of the dining-out crowd. For a very long time, Suruchi was the only restaurant serving Bengali food, and that too only at lunch. Aaheli came along a decade and a half ago and remained the sole option for a while; Oh Calcutta finally came to Kolkata too, but much more has changed in the Bengali food scene since. Kolkata, as I discovered on my last trip, is now full of Benga...

Most of Bengal's famous sweets come from Kolkata, but some particular ones have the names of other places attached to them.. Many of these places remain off the map for all but a small number of people who lived or went through those places. Shaktigarh, whose reputation rests on the langcha - is one such place. The common langcha , an elongated brown sausage of a sweet that adorns the counters of every mishti-shop in sight, is usually a distant cousin to the rossogolla , the chamcham , the sandesh , the mishti doi - more a change of palate than anything worth pursuing on its own. All that changes, though, when you come to the Shaktigarhi variant. Bigger, bolder, a much darker brown and dangerously addictive - this is no pale second-rung sweet. Its hard to believe that there can be anything uplifting about filling a longish paneer sausage with khoa and frying it in ghee, but the best of Shaktigarh is simply outstanding. The magic is in the quality of the ingredients, the mix a...

Ask anyone who's lived in Kolkata in his or her youth, and the one food they hanker for is the Kolkata Roll. Mustard fish, rossogolla. puchka, jhalmuri, all have undoubted appeal, but the most universal of the lot is the kati roll. Everyone except a dietician loves it. I don't visit Kolkata that much anymore, but its been my fortune to find the Kolkata roll becoming Bengal's biggest food export. New York, in particular, developed rather nicely as a roll destination; there were none when I moved there, now there are at least six. The most famous one - Kati Roll Company - is so popular it employs bouncers to keep the queues orderly. Other good choices, in order of preference are Indian Bread Company and Roomali , but nowadays Yelp lists over a dozen !! Mumbai had its own pretender - the Frankie invented by Tibb (whose son was briefly in college with me). However, the frankie is rolled in a naan rather than a paratha and filled with all manners of gooey curries (no barbecu...

There's whole rash of Bengali restaurants in Andheri Lokhandwala, where I stay, so I teamed up with a newly tattooed friend to test their mettle. The restaurants we chose were Hooghli , Hangla's and Calcutta Club . Of these, two (Hoogli and Calcutta Club) are within shouting distance of each other at the end of Oshiwara's restaurant row, while Hanglas is some distance away near Lokhandwala market. (view map) Now the question was how to test. Kosha Manghso, the seminal non-veg dish on a bong menu seemed like ideal to try the taste test. We decided to order a plate of Kosha Mangsho from each of the restaurants, and pair it with homemade luchis . The three deliveries were very interesting in their differences. All looked distinctly different from each other, had different prices and came in different packages. Hangla's medium brown version came in a big foil box and cost Rs 99. Calcutta Club delivered an orange version for Rs 80 while Hooghli was the most expensive -...

The one thing that signals good food time in Kolkata is the luchi. Not to be confused with the non-bong poori, the luchi signals a special treat in this primarily rice-eating part of the world. The differences are subtle but important - a true luchi should be a feather-light, puffed roundel that retains its shape on the plate and doesn't flop about like the commonplace poori. Luchis come in two varieties - the regular atta version and the perfectly white, incredibly light maida luchi that only bongs make. Of course, they look unhealthy but that picture is a dinner plate full of luchi; it took half a cup of flour and a tablespoon of oil (I put 4 tablespoons of oil in the kadahi, and three remained after I finished) - that's about as much as salad dressing! That should have been enough luchis for two light diners, but I was hungry. Everyone will tell you luchis are difficult to make, and it took me a long time to try making it. Frankly, the weight of culinary expectation dis...

On Saturday, I made a dessert as part of my multi-course extravaganza. The Bengali sweet tooth is legendary, so dessert is simply unavoidable. I made shujir payesh - a version of the famed bong payesh that is considerably easier to make than the rice variety. Shujir payesh, or polenta milk pudding, is actually one of the easiest and quickest desserts I know how to make, though I must admit it took me years of doing it wrong and failing to get it right. Its basically sooji (or rawa or polenta or grits) with milk, sugar and a little cardamom, optionally with raisins, cashews, pistachios, saffron and whatever else moves your cheese. Brown lots of cashews and raisins in a little ghee, then add a handful sooji and stir till the distinct aroma of frying sooji comes out (about 30 sec). Then add milk (at least twice the volume of sooji), a cardamom pod or two and sugar, thicken slightly and you're done. Stay low on the sugar; this is supposed to be only mildly sweet. Top it with saffron...

I finally got around to cooking a full, multi-course vegetarian meal for my friends. Here's what finally came out... Kumro bhate - Steamed pumpkin mash with coconut and raw mustard oil, and rice Posto bhate - poppyseed paste with raw mustard oil, and rice. This was actually the surplus poppyseed paste from the aloo posto, but it tastes great nevertheless Methi shaag - Fenugreek leaves stir fried with roasted peanuts Aloo posto - Potatoes in a poppyseed and nigella sauce Boti Chocchori - Cauliflower, peas and snow peas steamed with mustard. Snow peas, of course, are not traditional but substitute nicely for broad beans (sheem) which are. Mushur dal - Masoor dal with panch phoron and chopped cilantro Chhanar Dalna - Paneer in a ginger-cumin sauce with whole garam masala Shujir Payesh - Rawa milk pudding with saffron and cardamom. (Its actually five courses, because 4,5 and 6 are meant to be had together) All this, of course, with steamed rice. I ran out of Gobindobhog, but the...

When hunting for great food in the bylanes of Kolkata in my teenage years, one thing that we would often go looking for was the famed mutton rezala. Aminia, Nizam and many other places did good rezalas, but the most famous one was Shabir in Kolkata's Chandi Chowk area. I've been back to Shabir a few times over the years, but this time I went to the second-greatest rezala place in Kolkata - New Aaliya on Bentick street, very close to Statesman House - and came out licking my fingers for the next month. Rizala originates from Lucknow (and is even listed in Dastarkhan-e-Avadh by RK Saxena) but seems to have survived in Kolkata in a unique variant (and its not just the spelling that changed); I've never seen quite the same thing in any other city. Though RK Saxena's authoritative Avadhi recipe describes it as a thick white gravy, Rezala - its Kolkata variety - is spicy, thin and just a little sweet. Awadhi Rezala is made with mutton but in Kolkata, the chicken variety i...

Steaming is a time-honored way of cooking fishes, mostly because the results are so good. Microwaves aren't exactly time-honored, but they seem to be a great way to steam fishes without ...well... steaming them. The exotic Bengali word for steam is bhapa , and the most famous of the bhapa varieties are undoubtedly the one where mustard is involved. When wrapped in banana leaf, it's also called paturi . This is not the only way that bongs know to bring fish and mustard together, or even fish and steam - but it is the most well known. Bhapa fish is a really simple dish; just two things are absolutely required - mustard paste and fish. And, of course, a wrapper of some kind to steam in - traditionally banana leaf, but I use parchment when that's not around. You coat the fish with the mustard paste and steam it for enough time; this yields a fairly interesting (if not wonderful) mustard fish. In India, it's made with hilsa - the holy grail of steamed fishes - or bhetki ...

While Masoor starts life as pink, a little persuasion by hot water quickly converts it to a pale yellow. It's color makes it the easiest dal to recognise but people usually see the prepared version and go looking for a yellow dal. Bengalis use it a lot by itself while most other communities mix it with other dals. A light dal, it does not stand up well to heavy masalas. Here's my favorite recipe for it, which goes wonderfully well with spicy pickles and crunchy fries.

Dal pretty much the core of Indian food. One could argue that it is more imporant that even rice, since many areas of India are wheat-centered. Dal is eaten everyday by pretty much all of India in some form or the other. Dals are pulses (dried food crops of of the legume family), and come either with or without skin. The skins make a considerable difference to the taste, so different recipes call for skinned or unskinned dal. It is also the generic name for the many kinds of soupy dishes made from one or more of those pulses. Just to confuse things, only the soupy dishes are called 'dal' - other things made with the same stuff are not. I'm eventually going to write an introduction to the dals - and there are a surprising variety of varieties. People get confused by which dal is what - even Indians. Identifying the dals by sight is not simple; that is traditionally the first test of a Bengali housewife (and it seems both my aunts failed). Luckily, they recovered so when I la...

Bongs are very fond of bitterness. I'm not talking attitude or psychology; this is something that's far more important to the bhadrolok - food, or more specifically the first course at lunch. Now the whole business of a bong lunch is ridiculously elaborate. The full ceremonial version, usually served when someone is dead, goes to fifty plus courses and is supervised by a stern grandmother. More common, however, is a managaeable ten-odd choices in a very strict order and the first course is, traditionally, a bitter dish. The most common bitter is the pedestrian karela - usually steamed and mashed with potatoes in mustard oil - but there are more exotic choices None more than neem-begun and sojne phool. Neem, of course, is India's wonder herb - able to cure everything from bad hair days to tropical malaria, minor infection to major infestation. Its fruit is inedible and its tough, fibrous leaves taste bitter enough to deserve every wonder-drug epithet. The persistent bong,...