Sandeepa Datta Mukherjee - Bong Moms Cookbook

For

Sharanya, Ananya
Ma, Baba
And the H-man

Contents

Who or what is a Bong?

Bong commonly refers to the Bengali Homo sapiens (Latin: wise man or knowing man), native to the historic region of Bengal (now divided between Bangladesh and India) in south Asia.

What do Bongs eat?

Anything and everything, as long as it is followed by Gelusil, Pudin Hara, Jowaner Aarak or Nux Vom 30. To know more about a Bongs staple diet, visit a traditional Bengali home on a weekday morning between seven and nine. The Bong male gulps down rice, dal, aloo seddho (mashed potatoes), uchche bhaja (fried bittergourd), chorchori (mixed vegetables) and maachher jhol (the famous fish curry), all hot off the stove, rounded off by mishti doi (sweet yoghurt) before he leaves for opish. That is the Bongs staple diet and it is a sacrilege if the earning member of the house leaves home without being fortified by it. From bitter to sweet, a balance of tastes is the core of the Bengali meal.

At all other times, you can see this species grazing on phuchka, aloo kabli, egg roll and tele bhaja.

How do I know if the middle-aged Homo sapien female I met at my childs school is a Bong?

(a) On the first day of the kids school and even later, this species was hovering around the campus all morning, waiting for school to get over, looking visibly distressed.

(b) At your slightest smile the species proceeded to inquire whether your child learns Rabindra sangeet and takes math tuition.

(c) The species then regaled you with stories about how her offspring refuses every morsel of food that is offered and how hard it is to feed her/him.

If any of the above is true, you have met the Bong Mom, the kind of mother every Bong has, the kind that makes you thump your chest and proudly declare Mere paas Ma hain only you say it in Bengali.

Food ranks high in the Bong Moms dictionary, as do her children who, according to her, are always undernourished and stick-thin roga. To feed them well, a Bengali mother will spend an inordinate amount of time in the kitchen fixing elaborate meals in the ardent hope that they will make her spawn as strong as a dal-roti eating Punjabi.

In spite of this blind reverence for food, there is little known outside thickly shuttered Bengali homes about the species food habits. The world is, therefore, lulled into a false belief about the Bengalis fish-and-sweets-only diet.

In reality there are umpteen other dishes, from vegetarian ghonto and crispy beguni to musurir dal with fragrant paanch-phoron and slow-cooked spicy kosha mangsho. And that is what I have seen my mother, my grandmother, my aunts cook all their lives. Scalloped brass bowls, stainless steel platters and white ceramic plates filled with warm food rested on the kitchen counter every afternoon, smelling better than Dior. Dishes with distinct flavours and simple names like dalna, kaalia and ghonto were cooked each day.

Coming from such a race, it is not surprising that in spite of being globalized with artisan pizzas and greasy chicken tikka masalas, what the heart really craves is chorchori. And that is what I try to cook in my humble kitchen in the suburbs of New York. I adapt, tweak and adjust to blend those dishes in my busy workday, I gather their recipes from my mother, my husbands mother, my Kolkata neighbours mother, my cousins mother, a friends mother in short, all Bong motherhood and re-create them in my far-off kitchen, along with the stories and memories they bring with them.

Food, to me, goes beyond a means of sustenance and acid reflux (ombol, as we Bongs like to say). Rather, it is life wrapped in a soft egg roll with slices of crunchy onion and bites of feisty green chilli. It has something to tell. Always.

To be honest, though I have always loved food, my journey has been a long one, from a techie young woman who thought cooking is blah to my current self when on a good day I tell myself I find solace in cooking. Today, I find comfort in the smell of the spices sputtering in oil and my musurir dal connects me to memories of my Calcutta home. In my twenties I would have balked at this thought.

My culinary journey through Bengali cuisine is shared with my fish-hating, chorchori- and meat-loving husband, henceforth referred to as H-man and not to be confused with Superman or Batman. On this gastronomic highway I also mother two girls aged seven and three, giving them heavy doses of Sukumar Ray and forcing them to eat Bengali food in the name of kalchar or culture harbouring hope that one fine day they too will don the mantle of the Bong Mom.

In between I blog, chronicling my tales and recipes on the internet. Through my years of blogging and tinkering in the kitchen, I have realized that the recipe does not make the food. The main ingredient of Indian cooking is andaaz intuition. Though I have bound the recipes in measures of standard teaspoons and tablespoons, do not be constrained by them. Do what your senses tell you. Only do not add cream to aloo posto. Anything else you do should be fine.

As I see it, recipes are a mere framework, guidelines to help you create your own food memories; to experiment and make it your own; to find your own joy and spice box in the kitchen and to weave your own tale. That is what I want you to do with the recipes in this book. I did not write this book as a cookbook and the recipes shared here are those I cook at home according to the tastes of my family of four. When it comes to you, adjust, taste, create and, most importantly, enjoy the process, for the food is good but the story that you knit around it is better.

This is my story, but it might well be yours and maybe even yours.

Happy cooking!

Bong Mom

Bengalis dont eat breakfast; they eat a complete meal in the morning, or else they eat luchi.

It had been a few months since I started my blog. I was still tweaking HTML fonts and preening at the under-exposed, out-of-focus picture of aloo posto that I had managed to put up, when a reader left a comment asking, What do Bongs eat for breakfast? Soon, a few more joined in. They all wanted to know what a Bong eats first thing in the morning.

I was stumped. I hadnt expected such serious stuff when I started my blog. The blog was poised to be about my escapades in a life studded with lust, adventure and thrills. Okay, who am I kidding? The About Me section said it was going to be about a budding Bengali kitchen in suburbia 44.5 miles from New York City, to be precise where a mother was finding a way to share her roots with her two little daughters through a culture of food. In reality it was supposed to be about my food, finding my way through recipes I cooked at home, which worked for me. It was to be about my views, my kids, my dog. Okay, no dog, but still, it was supposed to be all about me, me and me. And here were perfect strangers asking me to stand up as a spokesperson of Bong United with questions about the Bongs morning food habit.

Me, I do not have a morning food habit. If you had mornings like mine, you wouldnt either.

5:30 a.m. I wake up to the sound of waves lapping against golden sand on the beaches of Hawaii. I snuggle deeper into the duvet, dreaming of an opulent Luau. In the next few seconds, the waves grow louder and crash around me. I wake up, drenched in fear, and realize it is the alarm, one of those new devices that do not believe in shrill sounds to wake you up. I slap it off and go back to sleep.