Every few months, The Bombay Canteen team collaborates with a home-chef to create a special pop-up menu celebrating different regional Indian cuisines. In the past, these have included Assamese, Parsi, and a Karnataka feast. This time around, they have partnered with Kolkata-based home-chef Iti Misra to present Bengali dishes that you’d be hard-pressed to find in a restaurant setting.
Flavour journey
“Bengali cuisine is served course by course, gradually moving from milder flavours to stronger ones”, says Misra as she ladles out the shukto over a mound of rice on the plantain leaf in front of me. A Bengali meal always starts with rice and shukto, a slightly bitter curry of five vegetables – drumstick, bitter gourd, potato, eggplant, and raw banana. “The bitter flavour cleanses the stomach and prepares it for the meal,” explains Misra. There’s also a specific flavour progression to the Bengali meal – bitter, sharp, hot, sour, and sweet. Along with the rice, there’s chingri bhorta on the side, a mildly spiced prawn and potato ball. “If you have big prawns, you want to show them off in a curry, but if the prawns are tiny, then we usually make this bhorta ”, laughs Misra.
In the next course, the rice is doused with a thin but flavourful shona mooger dal, (roasted yellow moong) which is flavoured with mango ginger. This is served with lashings of Jharna Ghee, a Bengali staple that’s been brought from Kolkata. It has an earthy, nutty flavour and a deeper golden-brown colour than regular ghee. This course includes a variety of fried items like posto borah (pan-fried poppy seeds cutlets), potol bhaja (deep-fried padval or pointed gourd), and bhaja ilish (fried hilsa fish topped with caramelised onions and green chillies).
Seasonal affair
“We Bengalis like to eat what’s in season, so summer is all about padval, lauki (bottle gourd), jackfruit etc.”, says Misra as she serves lau ghonto, a delightful, mild preparation of bottle gourd cooked in milk with some badi (dried lentil dumplings) added for texture. Other vegetarian delicacies on offer are mochar paturi (banana blossoms) and eychorer kofta (jackfruit kofta curry). The menu also includes East Bengali dishes like muitha dalna, fluffy, gnocchi-like dumplings made from chittol fish (which Rabindranath Tagore deemed superior to hilsa) as well the Mughal-influenced mutton rezala, a light yoghurt-based gravy with succulent pieces of goat meat. The fish main is horo gouri, a whole baby snapper, pan fried and served with two sauces. “This is also called Shiva-Parvati as the sweet and sour tomato-onion sauce balances the spicy, green chilli sauce”, explains Misra.
Before dessert, comes the palate cleanser – two types of chutneys (made with summer fruits) and papad. The aamer chutney is piquant green mango chutney, but the hands-down winner is the (ban) plastic chutney made from green papaya and so named because the sliced papaya resembles cut-up plastic pieces. We wind up the meal with aam kheer and patishapta, rice pancake stuffed with coconut and jaggery with a side of coconut sorbet drizzled with jaggery caramel. As I polish off the patishapta, Misra says, “now, it is time for bhaatghoom ”, referring to the rice-induced siesta so dear to the Bengalis. I couldn’t agree more.
Bengali Bhoj is on until June 10 for lunch and dinner at The Bombay Canteen, Lower Parel; the six-course set meal is available only for dinner with prior booking; some dishes can be ordered a la carte.
