I first met Krishnendu Ray when he was a bright young boy studying in Delhi. But I had no clue that he was going to turn into such a food expert. He is the co-editor (along with Tulasi Srinivas) of a book that has been entertaining me immensely for the last few days.
Called Curried Cultures: Indian Food in The Age Of Globalisation , the book looks at different aspects of food — cosmopolitan kitchens; food of the princes; dum pukht: a pseudo-historical cuisine; South Asian restaurants and the limits of multiculturalism in Britain; movement of crops, cuisine and globalisation; and dreams of a Pakistani grill in Manhattan.
I am immersed in the chapter called ‘Nation on A Platter: The Culture and Politics of Food and Cuisine in Colonial Bengal’ by Jayanta Sengupta.
Mastering the mysteries
It deals with, among other things, the way the British looked at food (and stuffed their faces) and had great disdain for the Indian kitchen. Bengal civil servant John Beames described the average Anglo-Indian official’s fare in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Chhota hazri or little breakfast was from 5.30 a.m. to 6 a.m., and consisted of tea, boiled or poached eggs, toast and fruit. Breakfast at 11 a.m. consisted of fried or broiled fish, a dish or two of meat, generally fowl cutlets, hashes and stews, or cold meats and salad, followed by curry and rice and dessert. Between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m., they had tea and cakes. Dinner at 7.30 p.m or 8 p.m.consisted of some soup, an entrée, roast fowls or ducks, occasionally mutton and in cold weather once or twice beef, an entremet of game or a savoury of sweets.
The influence of the colonials showed up in the Bengali kitchen. The author writes that as “the bhadralok fanned out to different parts of India and came into contact with non-Bengalis and Europeans, greater experimentation in cuisine became the rule”. There was pressure on the ideal modern grihini (housewife) to master not just the old ways but adopt modern styles of cooking too. The author writes that Girish Chunder Ghose noted that Bengali women in 1868 no longer collected fame by cooking “a simple soup or dish of porridge”, but had to “master the mysteries of pillaos and know exactly the true colour of a kabab in order to pass for learned in the art”.
A bhadramahila had to know: “Native Brahmin dishes of rice and curry, meat in Moghul style, sweetmeats made from chhana, coconut, semolina, lentils, pumpkins, and thickened milk; western-style pickles and jam, cakes, biscuits, puddings and breads; and Indian roti, luchi and puri.”
I can believe that, for the great many Bengali cookbooks in our house all demonstrate the Bengali homemaker’s expertise in cooking everything from cutlets, chops and devilled eggs to mustard fish curries and Mughlai parathas. The first Bengali cookbook, Sengupta tells us, was Pakrajeswar , published in 1831. The second edition was published with the financial assistance of the Raja of Burdwan in 1854. “Full of esoteric recipes collected from royal households in Mughal India, the book was hardly suitable for use in ordinary bhadralok homes,” he writes.
In 1883, Bengal saw the publication of Pak Pranali , a monthly magazine devoted to cooking and edited by Bipradas Mukhopadhyay. Like this chapter, every section of the book opens up a window to the world of food. I am going right back to it, for another glimpse of another time.
The writer, who grew up on ghee-doused urad dal and roti, now likes reading and writing about food as much as he enjoys cooking and eating. Well, almost.
