Bengali home cooking lessons
January 12th, 2012 § 1 Comment
Had a break from volunteering (more on that later) today because all the houses rest on Thursdays, so I decided to organize a Bengali home cooking lesson through Kali Home Travel. Rushing back to my hotel after attending a panel discussion on Rabindranath Tagore’s relationship with China organized by the Kolkata Literary Festival at the Oxford Book Store, where I was conscripted by a professor from Sichuan University to help him taken photographs of him speaking (long story), I met Martyn, one of the owners of Kali Home Travel, and John, a fellow traveler. Together, we took the Metro down to Kalighat, where we walked for another twenty minutes, reaching the suburban home of Rajishi, our cooking instructor for the day.
Rajishi finishing up her delicious tomato chutney. I'll upload better photos of the food next week!
Rajishi, a pleasant working housewife who has been teaching cooking on the side for eleven years, welcomed us warmly to her home and served us chai as she explained the basics of Bengali cooking. Bengali food differs from the food of other regions of India in that Bengal has had the good fortune of having a great variety of vegetables, spices and animal products available due to its climate and geographical location. Because of its location along the Ganges River, Bengali cuisine also features fish dishes prominently. The only other regional cuisine that does this is Keralan cooking, and interestingly, Kerala and Bengal share many similarities, such as high literacy rates and a history of Communist governments (this year being the first year that the Bengali government has not been Communist after some thirty years).
After the talk and the tea, we jumped right into the kitchen where we started work on our four dishes. We began with a fried eggplant dish where we placed the seasoned eggplants into a wok full of mustard oil, the preferred cooking oil in Bengal (the North uses vegetable oils like sunflower and the South uses coconut oil). The effect of the mustard oil and the mustard seeds and paste that we added was a heavily aromatic and delicious dish. The second dish that we made was a fried fish with home-made yogurt. The fish that we used was a common freshwater fish called rohu that can be subsituted with salmon if not available. Finishing the fish, we moved on to frying balls of onion, coriander and chili, bound by chickpea powder. The last dish that we made was a sweet tomato chutney (Rajishi prefers mango when they’re available during the summer months), which was great to eat after the other dishes as it helped counter the effect of the pepper and chili that we used.
The four dishes that we made today.
Turning off the stove, we headed out to the dining room where we had the opportunity to try our (by ours I mostly mean Rajishi’s) cooking which turned out pretty good. I left that afternoon with more than just a full stomach, but a greater appreciation of Bengali food and a deeper understanding of life in Kolkata through the conversations that we had with Rajishi. It’s not every day that you get to go into someone’s home when you’re traveling, especially into their kitchens.
Leaving Rajishi’s home, I decided to brave the unfamiliar neighborhood to go to Kali Temple without the aid of a map. With the help if some helpful auto-rickshaw drivers and traffic police, I made my way through the crowded markets to the temple, where streams of pilgrims clamored to get into the temple to give their offerings and receive their blessings. It was also here where I may or may not have been the victim of an elaborate con that involved me donating a significant amount of money to buy rice for the poor fed at the temple every day. Con or not, I was escorted round the bustling temple and given “VIP” access without having to wait in the long lines.
With my wallet lighter, I had a simple dinner of Indo-Chinese chicken chow mein from a street food stall instead of the normal restaurant meal.
[...] They’re of the food that I helped (by helped I mean watched) prepare last Thursday during my Bengali home cooking lesson. Enjoy. WP_SLIDESHOW_IMAGES = { load: [...]