Bengali food!! ;)

Once someone I know told me, in very proud tones, that there are only FOUR great cuisines in the world: French, Italian, Chinese and Bengali.
At that, I smiled inwardly: having no data to support the claim, nor any inclination to refute it, that was the best I could do. But that was when all my neccessities in the gastronomical direction would be taken care of by Ma.
Then, during my student days, another friend told me, 'If you don't know how to cook, you are no gourmand!' (This I may still contest, but I did eventually learn, and come to like cooking, and have to accept the simple fact that the general appreciation of good food increases by almost 10-fold when you appreciate the method of making it.)
But the point here is, as people who know me already know (there is no way they can't know this if they claim to know me!), if you share a fraction of the enthusiam that I have for good food, you will enjoy the article below.
DISCLAIMER: This one revolves only around that inimitable cuisine: bangali ranna. However, it does not mean there is any less appreciation for the numerous other varities of dishes that the other parts of the country/world has to offer. It's simply like this: anyone who's a true Bengali at heart also invariably shares a liking that almost borders on a passion for the dishes and cooking style of Bengal. It is genetic, and very little can be done about it, as for us Bengalis, food is not for subsistence, it is a way of life.
Am pasting an article that I came across on the net, one lazy day when I was surfing the net to better my skills as a cook. The article was written by Budhdhadeb Bose, and had been translated by the author himself from the original Bengali Bhojon-shilpi Bangali. The translation has been published in the daily newspaper The Hindusthan Standard of Calcutta. The Bangla article, first titled "Bhojan-Bilasi Bangali" but later changed to "Bhojon-shilpi Bangali" appeared in 4 daily installments in the Ananda Bazar Patrika of Calcutta, during January 1-4, 1971. Recently, in 2004, this has been published in book form by Vikalp, Kolkata.

THE ARTICLE:
There is no such thing as "Indian food"; the term can only be defined as an amalgam of several food-styles, just as "Indian literature" is the sum-total of literatures written in a dozen or more languages. And I think it is no less difficult for Indians to eat each other's food than speak each other's tongues; an "Indian" dinner which a Tamil and a Sikh and a Bengali can eat with equal relish, is more of a dream than reality. This point was curiously brought home to me on one occasion during my travels in America. I had arrived rather tired after a jerky flight at some little university town; meeting me at the airport my sponsor told me with a smile that he had arranged for me an Indian meal with an Indian family. "I am sure it would be very much to your liking," he added. I at once asked, "Which part of India do they come from?" The professor did not know. The upshot of it was that I spent the night hungry, having been unable to consume anything except a few spoonfuls of plain rice and a cup of coffee at the table of the charming Tamil family, where the professor had piloted me from the airport. I hasten to add that no offense is meant to my gracious host of the evening, nor do I think I need apologize for my provincialism. I have seen high-born South Indian ladies ready to faint at the fishy odour issuing from a Bengali kitchen. It's a case of the fox and the stork, and you can't do anything about it Certain varieties of Indian diet are mutually exclusive.
We cannot be sure whether there was ever a standard diet for the whole of India--available records are meagre, and no gastronomic counterpart of the Kamasutra is in existence. All we can guess on the basis of literary evidence is that the ancients were a meat-eating, wine-tippling people, inordinately fond of milk-products and beef-eaters as well.[1]The Buddha himself did not impose a ceiling ban on flesh-eating, many of his followers (Bengalis?) ate fish habitually. The only strict vegetarians in ancient India were the Jains--a rather small and relatively isolated community with scant influence on the social life of orthodox sects. How and when both beef and pork came to be interdicted and the great schism between vegetarians and flesh-eaters arose on the Indian soil cannot be ascertained with any degree of precision; we do not even know whether these arose of religious or circumstantial pressure. Nor we can form a clear idea about the type or types of cooking current in the Vedic and epic ages. Homer describes each meal with meticulous care, dwelling on every detail from the slitting of the bull's throat to the hearty appetites of the heroes; but the great sprawling Mahabharata is remarkably--even annoyingly--silent on such points. The phrase randhane Draupadi--`a Draupadi for cooking' has come down to us and is cited to this day, but not once do we see this proud lady actually in the kitchen, not even during the period of exile; the feeding of the wrathful Durvasa and his one thousand disciples was magically accomplished by Krishna, without any effort on Draupadi's part. Bhima, we are told, served a whole year as the chef in Virata's household, but as regards the delicacies he presumably concocted for the royal table, we are left completely in the dark. The Ramayana does a little better; we often see Rama and Lakshmana bringing home sackfuls of slain beasts (wild boars, iguanas, three or four varieties of deer. We are also told that their favourite family diet consisted of spike-roasted (meats) (shalyapakva), known nowadays as shik-kebab or shish-kebab); --unfortunately no other detail is supplied. Who skinned the carcasses or made the fire or turned the flesh on the spit, what were the greens and fruits eaten with the meat or the drinks with which it was washed down--all this is left to our conjecture. Nevertheless, we are eternally grateful to Valmiki for the passage describing the entertainment provided by the sage Bharadvaja to Bharata and his retinue; there is nothing to compare with it in the Mahabharatan accounts of the Raivataka feast or Yudhishthira's Horse-Sacrifice. For once in our ancient literature we find the courses itemized--savoury soups cooked with fruit-juice, meat of the wild cock and peacock, venison and goat-mutton and boar's meat, desserts consisting of curds and rice-pudding and honeyed fruits, and much else of lesser importance. All this is served by beauteous nymphs on platters of silver and gold, wines and liqueurs flow freely, there is dance and music to heighten the spirit of the revels. Granted that the whole account is somewhat fantastical--it was the gods who had showered this splendour on that forest hermitage--a splendour that rivals that of Ravana's palace in Lanka; but this at least tells us what Valmiki thought a royal banquet should be; evidently he had experience of a highly sophisticated culture.
To read the same passage in the medieval vernacular versions is to be transferred to altogether another world--a world hedged in by scruples where the cult of Kama--the pleasure-principle of life, which was highly honoured in the heroic age, had fallen into desuetude and the epic tales were used as vessels of unrelieved piety. In both Tulsidas and Krittivas many details of the original are suppressed or glossed over; in both, the vegetarian bias is strong. Tulsidas vaguely mentions "many luxuries", but lists no more than roots and herbs and fruits; the only drink he names is "undefiled water". Krittivas begins and ends with milk-products. Both poets, living in impoverished rural-agricultural communities, recoil from magnificence and reduce Bharadvaja's feast to a modest meal, which their public would find both tempting and innocuous
It is refreshing to turn from Krittivas to Kavikankan and watch the huntsman Kalketu wolfing his dinner--putting away huge mounds of rice with the aid of crab-meat and one or two leafy vegetables. We almost hear him crunching the crab-shells and spitting out the well-chewn remnants; we admire the authenticity of the remark he flings at his wife: "You have cooked well, but is there more?" Yet we cannot accept this as typical of the daily Bengali fare in Kavikankan's time; the eater's taste reflects his off-track occupation rather than the norm. Bharatchandra's famous line, "May my children thrive on milk and rice" must not be taken literally, for "milk and rice" is a metaphor for prosperity and well-being. It is only in our prose fiction from Rabindranath and Saratchandra down to the present times that we find adequate accounts of what the Bengalis eat, each according to his station in life and individual taste. Menus are often mentioned, variations noted; some lady-novelists have done us the additional favour of describing methods of cooking. Of food as a means of characterization there is a fine example in Rabindranath's novel Jogajog. Madhusudan has made his millions by honest toil, is aggressively proud of his wealth, is fond of vain display, his dinner service is all silver; yet his favourite diet is coarse rice, one of the inferior varieties of dal, and a mash of fish-bones and vegetables. The addition of this little gastronomical detail makes it all the more clear what a "tough guy" the poor ethereal Kumudini has to confront in her new home. On another level food has made its way into Bengali verse--and not merely for comic effects as in Ishvar Gupta.
(contd...)