Kinaara

Poorna Banerjee is a freelance foodie and part-time cook. She aspires to become a nutritional anthropologist some day, but till then she is just a Marketing Head working with Rotary Computer Centre, Kolkata.

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The first image that came to my mind when I gulped down the first mouthful of a “Bengali” lunch at a friend’s place was: Oh God, What a monstrosity! They have NO idea what they are making! This is just bad food.

The lady told me her tales of authentic Bengali food which she had learnt from a cooking guru who guaranteed high fibre and low calories, as well as the exactness of the recipes from the households of common people. I looked into the recipes and gasped with outrage at the gross stereotype of a culinary mammoth which has taken hints from not just Indian but Indonesian, Burmese, Chinese, Japanese, French, British and even Greek cuisine. It has become a trend nowadays to forget the past generations’ incredible treasure trove of recipes in lieu of those created in some distant Northern lands, where food historians have commented on the birth of different kinds of cooking method based on a lack rather than affluence of ingredients.

My parents speak of traditional Bengali family lunches with sighs of nostalgia. They resent the idea of eating no more than four different items at one meal just as much as they dislike eating food in the living room while watching TV. Both my parents grew up in large families where people never ate their meals alone. Mothers and sisters would wait for the tired men of the house to return and sit down for a bout of home-cooked food. Grandmothers would compete with the newlywed aunts for supremacy in the kitchen, offering more than fourteen different delicacies in the same plate as a part of the regular meal. The women in the house were all assigned to various kitchen duties, from cutting and peeling vegetables to pasting and grinding on the mortar and the pestle.

My mother fondly recalls how, as a child, she would sit at the porch after school and watch her mother prepare dinner along with her numerous aunts and grandmothers – all of them working together, exchanging gossips, recipes and little tips for the better running of the house. My grandmother’s mother, as family hearsay goes, could cut potato alone into twenty-five different shapes. She was amazingly fast and stupendous cook who would finish cooking meals for more than fifteen people in a couple of hours, single-handed.  The kitchen was a space for female bonding. The huge, heavy utensils would be a sign of prosperity, their brass-and-copper elegance adding to their durability. Every morning would begin with a ritual of scrubbing the pots and pans down with the ash from the coal unun, and new fire would be started on the pyre of the old.

My grandmother remembers the aftermath of the World War II in Patna, where refugees from Nepal, Orissa and Manipur would roam the streets for phyan. The leftover water after the cooking of rice would be earnestly drunk, to fill the empty bellies of entire families. She recalls the sudden decrease of the number of items cooked.

‘Only six courses, and at a house like ours, can you believe that?’ she tells me, recoiling.

‘What about now?’ I counter. Six courses to me naturally sounds like an enormous meal, not something that is barely scraped through to save face at the time of famine.

‘Now it is different,’ my grandmother says, ‘No one has time to eat now.’

I focused on that statement. To my eighty-odd-year-old grandmother, the passage of time had registered on the diminishing count of the dishes served at each meal. And I found myself wondering when and why we have left behind that wholesome and glorious tradition.

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Among other misconceptions, the one that distresses me the most is the accusation of unhealthiness brought against traditional Bengali food. Like Italian, Bengali cuisine varies subtly from household to household and drastically from one part of Bengal to the other, but a basic pattern remains constant. The basic Bengali meal even thirty years ago was a skillfully balanced affair of four distinct categories of food – chobyo, choshyo, lejhyo and peyo – or food which is consumed by, respectively, chewing, sucking, licking and drinking. Each meal was founded upon six different tastes: sweet, sour, salty, earthy (koshay), hot and bitter. Each taste was obtained from a separate component of the meal; for example, the sweet would come from sugars and fruits, and the bitterness from green vegetables. Every meal was structured to incorporate different food groups, creating a fine balance where food would counter food. Sitting down on a mat with legs folded together in the lotus posture and slow eating would help in the proper digestion of the meal.

A typical meal would begin with steamed rice – bhaat – unadorned with any other ingredient but its own moisture. Devoid of any specific taste, it serves as the bonding agent to tone the other constituents of the meal according to the eater’s taste. An optional dollop of pure ghee might add a hint of fragrance to this clarity. The first item served with the rice is the bhaate – a piece from a vegetable that was boiled alongside the rice in the same pot. The bhaate is served with mustard oil/ghee/butter, salt and a green chili, to carve the earthy texture and flavour of the vegetable while it is mashed by the eater into the correct consistency.

Following the bhaate would be a dish made of chiefly vegetables or green leaves, which would complement the simple flavours by adding hints of spices. This dish might sometimes be spiked with shrimps or fish, mostly the fish head and bones, to lend a fishy goodness to the otherwise bland vegetables. This remains a tempting way and possibly the safest way of loading up on the leafy greens, since there is no chance of random bacteria entering the system through raw, uncooked leaves. As the vegetables are stir-fried and not cooked for hours, their nutritional value would be mostly preserved as well.

After this would arrive the dal, tempered with a dash of whole spices like a bay leaf or fennel seeds, or a single sun-dried red chili would soak itself in it. Generally, the dal was cooked first, as it does not spoil easily and can be re-heated before the meal is served. In my household the dal is served with any kind of fried vegetable or fish or papad, which would be the last item off the kitchen, still sizzling as it is brought to the plate.

There would be then the time for the fish or meat of the day. In the days of my childhood, chicken was considered foreign in my house. My great-grandmother would disdain it as mlechho. Sundays were days for meat, and the meat was always from a goat, especially a rewaji goat which was killed by the Halaal rather than the Jhatka, because Halaal meat always tasted better. My father explained that something about the way the goats ran around after their throats were slit pumped more adrenaline down their muscles, and the pores expanded enough to let in the flavours of the spices it would later be cooked in.

Fishes were sacred to every Bengali household. No two fishes were cooked with the same recipe, and the recipes were all tried and tested over generations to achieve the perfect balance between fluidity and freshness. One rule prevailed: the freshly caught fish would be dressed with the merest hints of turmeric and chili before being fried, and then added to a light cumin- or mustard-flavored jhol, which is the Bengali term for a jus. Unlike gravies, a jus retains greater fluidity and therefore can easily be mixed with the rice. A multitude of fishes would enter our kitchen with alarming speed, and be decimated with even more alarming swiftness. My father, a champion in this area, would hold competitions with my uncle on the number of pieces of fish they could eat at one go. A particular record with a total of fifty-two pieces of fishes consumed between the two men put a stop to those competitions following a sound scolding by my grandmother.

The end of the meal, eventually, would be ushered by the chutney. Most of the times, sweetmeats would be reserved for breakfast or dinners, when the rest of the meal is light. The chutney would do the honours for lunch, the heaviest meal of the day, ending it on a sweet-and-sour note. The chutney, light or heavy, would be made with seasonal fruits, tomatoes, or preserved fruits like dates, raisins and aamsatva (dried puree of mangoes). Sometimes, homemade yoghurt, sour or sweet , would finish off the meal. Served after the rice-laden meal is over, both the chutney and the yogurt would fill the dual roles of dessert and digestive.

And this whole ritual would take place, every day, day after day, round the year. Other items would be added to the menu, and yes, there were people who ate home-cooked food every day of the year. It is not there were no restaurants or street food then. It was just that the people did not feel inclined to spend good money on “hotel food” which they knew was nutritionally inferior to home-cooked food.

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So why has this stopped now? The chief reason is the drastic change in our perception of food. Time has made kitchens unfashionable – even people who spend virtually all day at home believe they have better things to do than spending time in the kitchen. We have forgotten that the kitchen is not just a place where you go get a morning cup of coffee but a place of meeting and companionship. Even a few years ago, processed food like sugared breakfast cereals were something we were used to see in the backs of a ripped Archie comic book. Now they have become a part of our daily routine. Day by day, we are relying more on refrigerated and processed food. That what comes in cans and can be stored for ages inside the cold fridge has now become the height of our culinary accomplishment. Cleaning up the fridge is a journey no less adventurous than a treasure hunt: leftovers from months, in some case, even years can be found once you peer inside the cold depths of the icebox. One of the major reasons why food is no longer as nutritious as it was thirty years back is because of the emergence of the refrigerator, which preserves food, and destroys essential nutrition.

In the name of bringing in the foreign brigade (read cuisines around the world), we are flinging away the soul food that we have the access to, right at our fingertips. Every time a child chooses a burger over a telebhaja, we lose connection with our own food, which is our regional heritage. We faithfully endorse the cuisines of cultures that is technically and geologically unsuitable for us. Ours is a land of heat, dust and humidity and traditional cuisine that we have has essentially evolved as a response to this kind of climate. This balance is not being maintained, giving rise to common health hazards.

Over the last twenty years, obesity has risen up as one of the most alarming problems with Bengali men and women, thanks to their obsession with “fast” food out of the house. Diet charts have taken a major position in our households, and as days go by, more people are succumbing to stress related psychological issues, resulting in food-related trauma and rapid weight shifts which is growing with alarming rate. But while we are quick to ditch traditional, home-cooked food in the favour of supposedly healthy, calorie-measured, artificial food, we conveniently forget to look at their ingredients where lo and behold! the things that go into most of them sound like a bio-chemical experiment gone wrong. Thanks to the preservatives, most of the “nutrition” does not even stand a chance of entering our system. What, however, never fails to enter is the addiction to sugar and its siblings, thanks to the added insulin boost our body gets after eating  sugar right in the beginning of the cycle of our day.

I intended to write this piece as an enumerator of the Bengali cuisine, but I think I end here as a person deeply concerned about the way our food is being marked as evil and fattening and calorie-laden. It’s not the food, I would say, it’s the way it is created and consumed. If we read a bit more about what goes in our plates and not sacrifice flavours and tastes in the altar of misguided diet plans; if we put in a bit more concern for the heritage and historical significance of our food, we can preserve our own cultural remnants which is rapidly being shredded and discarded as primitive, obsolete and unfashionable at the altar of “right food” which is probably one of the most dangerous terms ever created in the history.

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