Pratap Kumar Roy
Permit me to assume that Calcutta cuisine is synonymous with Bengali cuisine.
Did we eat any better in Bengal in the last century or in the centuries before that? It is impossible to know how tasty the food was then or how much more sophisticated the art of cooking was. Food was then not regarded as a very important component of the art of living. Description of food in old literature is scanty. Men had other more important preoccupations. The women of the house certainly had more time and did devote a good part of their time in preparation of food. But they did not write chronicles. The great scholar, Dr. Sukumar Sen, traced Bengali food from sixteenth century literary works. Nothing is known of the Bengali's culinary practices of earlier periods. He found mention of rice and only a few fish dishes and ghee, milk kheer and chhana in plenty. Meat or fish was eaten by the non-Brahmins only.
Use of chhana for making sweets of heavenly quality is a Bengali innovation, honed to perfection during the following centuries. Rasogolla and sandesh, which explored new horizons, were yet to be conceived. Rasogolla is a little over a century old and certain varieties of sandesh were created only a few decades before that. The innumerable varieties of sandesh of today would have surpassed even the imagination of the gourmet. We cannot say then that sweets were better in earlier times.
But it must be recorded that we are slowly killing the tradition of home made pitha, and the not so expensive sweets made out of rice powder, sweet potato, kheer, coconut and gur. Those delectable wholesome items are no longer common items of the Bengali's food. That is not because we have lost the art of making those delicacies at home, but because the time required is no more available for the lady of the house. It is sad, but it was inevitable.
The pristine qualities of Bengali food are being affected by other influences. I sometimes feel what a tragedy it has been for the North Indian to have discovered tomato. I see it's thoughtless use in the large feasts served by caterers on festive occasions in Bengal. Use of coriander leaves has been equality thoughtless. Tomato entered the Bengali kitchen as a hesitant outsider. Until only a half century ago it was known as belati begun and its use restricted to a variety of not- too-much-in-demand chutney.
The so-called Punjabi food, now unfortunately known as Indian food all over, uses a mishmash of tomato and onion for anything that goes into a cooking pan. The subtle flavours of each dish, or shall we call it, its individuality, is mercilessly drowned. This is a tendency, which has started making inroads into Bengali cuisine also, and certainly in the presentations of professional caterers of Bengali food. An overdose of coriander leaves is also not infrequent. It is time that we take serious notice and not let our cuisine be debauched.
Like the delicate use of herbs in French cuisine, Bengali masters used outside flavouring agents with great discretion for the purpose of bringing out the special taste of the main ingredients. Hing, coriander leaves or garlic an expert used in curries as a litterateur uses metaphor to make his creation more sensitive and appealing. The flavouring agents should not be overbearing and moreover their unobtrusive presence should not be felt.
Once we have armed ourselves against such unwelcome intrusions, I suggest Bengali food has not deteriorated but, on the other hand, has gone through a process of evolution to be more delicate and more appetising. True, the use of green jackfruit, its seeds or banana flower or the astringent insides of banana stems are not to be seen in our daily menu. These items are difficult and time consuming to prepare and also take considerable time for pre-cooking preparation. In fact one of the distinguishing elements of Bengali cuisine is its pre-cooking preparation. It is only the Japanese who make five or six varieties of raw fish and the only distinction between the various dishes lies in the different shapes and sizes of the pieces of fish. In Bengali cuisine also, the size and shape of various vegetables will be dictated by the kind of dish you are going to make of them. The ubiquitous potato, for example , from its small pyramidal shape for bati chachhari will be a full length quarter piece for jhol. In dalna and kalia, again, the shapes will be of another kind. Try it with any other casual shape or size and watch the ruination of a promising dish.
There is one sad change in the cooking medium. Ghee has yielded its place to refined oil and mustard oil to not so refined oils of all sorts. The Bengali palate, used to the taste and aroma of raw ghee (made from cow's milk) and rice as the first item of lunch (squeeze a drop or two of scented lemon, if you please), would rather miss that first course if ghee is not of that quality. Towards the middle of the meal will be a macher jhol and the raw, sharp taste of mustard oil had to be there - a taste even those who use mustard for cooking in Uttar Pradesh and Punjab will find difficult to relish because of naked use of mustard oil.
Let me come back to old Bengali food. In the first decade of the seventeenth century, Kabikankan Mukundaram describes a meal beginning with shukta followed by a legion of vegetable dishes, nearly as many fish dishes with koi, chital, prawn and rui in fried form or in gravy (jhol), prawn with jackfruit seed, meat with masur, and mango or am with fish for ambal.And, of course, the ubiquitous rice throughout. The meal ends with several kinds of pitha.
Another hundred and fifty years later, Bharatchandra describes the dishes of a banquet. This has more of metaphor than reality, one suspects, and perhaps the poet has put down in this narration the whole repertoire of dishes then prevalent. It includes twenty three courses: katla, bhekur (bekti), koi, prawn in different incarnations of jhal, jhol, fry. The present day chhanchra, fish-roe pakoda, fish with a bitter vegetable also are included. Finally, he mentions meat in kalia, dalna, ragi, sekchi and samosa. At the end, there is a casual mention of sheek kabab. Before we reached the desserts, we have still to wade through the sour dishes, with radish, bada and badi with chalta, wild small plum, tamarind, amda and / or madar. I am not going through the list of sweets that follows as already we have enough to cause indigestion for a month.
Bharatchandra casually mentions luchi which was quite uncommon in those days as must have been several other items in the list. I am also not sure if he means sweetened luchi, as the item is sandwiched between pitha and payas. We have the authority of Mahendranath Dutta, younger brother of Swami Vivekananda who, writing of the eighteen seventies, says that luchi was not very common (even then) and was served for Brahmins only in special feasts.
I believe luchi, as developed here, has glorified Bengali food and given it a touch of unsurpassable class. Its preparation for reaching the highest art form is simple yet quite delicate and can only be accomplished by masters of the art. It is in this art that Calcutta excelled. You cross the river, not to speak of going east, the glory that is luchi is lost. Rich white in colour, delicate to the touch, emanating a most distinguished blend of the flavours of pure ghee and maida, crisp, straight from the pan to the plate - it is an ethereal experience beyond imagination. It is like the flake of an autumn cloud, radiating an ambience that cannot be matched. The light, crisp and delicious luchi is not available outside Bengal and is at its super best in Calcutta. Luchi goes like a house on fire with fried potato. But fried potato signifies nothing, for the Bengali cuisine is not hamstrung between French fries and wafers - we can have at least six manners of making alubhaja - a most simple thing, again, but that has the potential of being unique. In fact, rasogolla or sandesh are made of simple and the smallest number of ingredients and yet yield so many varieties, as does the artist with black ink portray all the colours of the world - the word artist underlined.
So long as the tradition of luchi, sandesh and rasogolla is not lost and as we keep on developing new varieties of sandesh - I have only to say that the present is no less exciting than the past, if not better.
The author, a well-known newspaper editor, and has been Chairman of the Press Trust of India, Audit Bureau of Circulation and the President of the Indian Newspaper Society. He has written a book in Bangla on eating pleasures.
