The best thing about Delhi winter is its onset. This — and again when winter is petering out — is the only time we can sit outdoors in the evening, and eat al fresco without fussing about shawls and sweaters or worrying about staining our silks with haldi -rich oil and masala. If only we had gardens to do this in, but clubs are a close alternative: there’s the relaxed atmosphere of a home without the housewifely worry attendant on entertaining.
Last week the India International Centre had its annual Bengali dinner. There’s a slew of cultural and academic events, but food is the way to my heart. This year chairs and round tables were laid out under a sloped marquee of translucent white fabric — so the dew was of no concern — with buffet tables ranged around the edges. Waiters were leaping about and snacks appearing on tables: “Madam, fish fingers? Mochaar chop?” It’s taken me some years to understand and remember that in Bengali cooking parlance, a chop is called a cutlet, and a cutlet a chop. Anyway that night, there were only chops, banana flower and vegetable, which was a mix that included red beetroot. Preparing mocha , banana flower, is apparently a full day’s job. There must be some something in its taste that makes the schlep worthwhile, but it escapes me. There were also crisp, crumb-fried fish fingers, delicious in the over-fried way one wouldn’t cook at home, and chicken legs, which I didn’t touch. I’m open to correction, but I think chicken legs start northwest of Delhi.
Then we proceeded to help ourselves to dinner. There were three delicious vegetables, each cooked with many spices and in complicated ways — not the sort that I would do myself on a weekday evening. There was a chachhari , a dark mishmash of a medley of vegetables in thick masala paste flavoured with paanch phoron . The flavour of mooli , radish, which was cut into batons, stood out. Stuffed parwals , potol, were next, in a thick reddish sauce reeking of hing . They were filled with paneer and raisins and the combination of firm parwal and soft paneer , smelling pungently of asafoetida and tasting sweetly of raisins, was unexpectedly good.
But the dish I liked best was of posto , khuskhus : poppy seed ground to a paste and cooked with jhinge , tori , in an abundance of good desi ghee. Khuskhus is a spice I love to eat but know not how best to cook it. My mother used to cook it in stuffed tindas and I would love to recreate the buttery, melting taste. The jhinge posto falls in the same category: bland cucurbit cooked in its own juice with lashings of ghee soaked into the mild, nutty flavoured poppy seed.
The meats. There was malai chingri , huge prawns cooked in coconut cream, the shell dark pink and the flesh white, sweet and tender. There was shorshe bhetki , the fish pieces cooked in a paste of mustard seeds, which melted in the mouth, and with large chunks of fresh deep red chillies that I fished out into my plate. Kosha maangsho , mutton cooked in a thick brown masala, was a bit ho-hum, the gravy unnecessary — I thought it should have been a dry meat, bhuno’d till dark brown with the masalas almost completely absorbed in the meat. But the matarer kochuri it was to be eaten with, were the best in class. I could have eaten six. The kachoris were puffed and golden, not very big, and filled with smashed green peas flavoured with hing and saunf . And there were achar-chutni : kasundi and a sweet pineapple chutney. I missed green chillies and freshly cut lime. Gandharaj would have been ideal, but would have made do with any old local variety. There was also a vegetable niramish polao and although I’m told that pulao is mandatory in a Bengali banquet, I could have done with plain white boiled rice that would have set off the delicate flavours of all the rest.
Dessert I’m told was wonderful — rasgullas sweetened with nutan gur and many other things besides, but the taste of the savoury khana is what I’d like to remember.
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