As for hilsa, that noble and most versatile of fish, the hilsa alone is capable of yielding as many as five courses with delectable gradations in taste. You begin with the cool tender gourd seasoned with the head of the fish, the spare bones have gone into your mungh dal which comes with the meaty neck-bone fried brown and crunchy; then follow a mild jhol with slices of the green pumpkin and dotted with seeds of the black cumin, and a pungent "bhate" or "paturi" steamed in a sealed jar or braised in a covering of banana-leaf, thickened with oil and mustard-paste. And finally, just for "cleaning your mouth", comes the tail-end of the fish--the least appealing part but made most pleasant with sweetened lime-juice and the green chili. And to get the best out of it all, you must make the slices triangular and never allow onions or ginger or potatoes to approach this queen of fishes, for cooking hilsa with any of them is a worse offence than cooking rohit-kalia without them. But it is only once in a while that a Bengali would eat hilsa from the beginning to the end of a meal: his general fare is much more varied. Thanks to the natural resources of his homeland, the researches of the ancients, the no-longer exotic fruits and vegetables introduced by European adventurers, and the admixture of Shakta and Vaishnavic strains in his blood and of Brahmanical and heterodox elements in his culture, the Bengali has developed a philosophy of food which is both eclectic and sensible. I know that a la carte menus in Chinese and European restaurants can be fantastically long and elaborate, yet I do think that Bengali food has a wider range than any other I have experienced. What I mean is that Bengali food is designed to cover the entire range of the palate and satisfy every need of human body-chemistry. The Chinese eschew bitters and avoid milk or sweets; in the Occident you may find the bitter or sour taste only in alcoholic drinks, but never a hint of either in any food. The thought that whole areas of sensation should be expelled from the art of cooking would have pained the ancient Hindus who recognized six primary tastes--sweet, sour, saline, bitter, pungent, astringent---along with sixty-three minor variations. Now Bengali food embraces the six primary tastes and many of the variants as well, has room for both animal flesh and the fruits of the earth, can compete with Swiss fare in the variety of milk-based or fruit-based desserts--in short, comprehends all available edibles except the one or two kinds of flesh forbidden by custom. It is wonderful to relate that the dessert itself has two sections in Bengal--first, a sour or sweet-and-sour course, and finally a sweet dish made of casein [5] or thickened milk (ksheer). "From shukto to payesh", was Rabindranath's phrase for a complete Bengali meal, and this is only another way of saying that one must begin with bitters and end with sweets. Actually, there are three different ways of beginning a meal. You can eat your first few handfuls of rice a la Brahmannaise, with heated ghee and a pinch of rock-salt, or with the so-called "bitter" dal---green mungh cooked with the karala fruit, which is slightly and delightfully hitter. The third alternative is the shukto [6] commended by the great poet or a green or red sag, of which there are as many varieties as of sandwiches in Scandinavia. As for the finish, it must be made with some "white stuff"----either plain milk-and-rice in the plebeian style of Madhusudan in Jogajog, or sour or sweet curd preferably prepared at home or some more sophisticated product of milk. And between the two extremities may be rowed five or six courses--the salines and the pungents and the sours, fish, meat, and meaty vegetables---each with a different combination of spices and a different appeal to the tongue. A Hungarian lady married to a Bengali poet once said to me, "You Bengalis use too many spices in your food---by your style of cooking, you could make a pair of old shoes edible." Her remark was both unjust and just. It is true that Bengalis (and especially East Bengalese) sometimes ruin the flavour of the original substance by an excessive use of "hot" spices like cloves or seeds of the smaller cardamom. An example of this is the aforementioned dhoka which a1most loses its identity in layers and folds of spice. A similar treatment is accorded to crabs and certain big fish of the scaleless and carnivorous kind, also to the flesh of the black tortoise, of which the best are found in the easternmost districts of Bengal. And spices are triumphant in that dish of Burmese origin prized by many of my East-Bengalese friends---the "shutki machh", odoriferous dehydrated fish which look like pieces of wood in the bazar and are made palatable only with the generous assistance of onions and garlic and the fiery dry scarlet-coloured chili. Yet this is but one little chapter in the story of Bengali food; the general rule is to use spices discreetly---not with a view to overwhelm, but to balance the effect of the whole. Also, there are dishes made of animal food which are "cool" and most enjoyable---for instance, the traditional Puja-time meat, the young goat cooked in a jhol as thin as the clearest of consommés, sparkling with natural juices and delicately flavoured by a few demure bay leaves. Every Bengali knows that the spring hilsa is intolerant of every spice except turmeric, that the smaller catfish is glorious with slices of the green banana and just a dash of ginger and the yellow cumin, and the pabta fish needs no heady spices if dressed with the coriander-leaf ---an aromatic product of the soil which smells like a "green breeze" blowing over grassy meadows, as a Verlaine or Jibanananda Das would have said. And when it comes to sharper food, it is not the "hot" spices which are guilty in themselves--- they normally serve to make the dish more agreeable and eupeptic---it is only when used in excess that they hurt the stomach, and this is true of every food and drink known to man. Bengali food suffers from one serious drawback: it cannot be publicized or commercialized. In this great city of Calcutta you will not find a single restaurant which provides an honest good Bengali meal---a menu, let us say, of plain fine well-boiled rice, a savoury shukto, thinly cooked masur dal with slices of the fragrant lime (clearly distinguished from the more juicy variety), along with crisply fried maurala fish to "put into your mouth", and, with luck, a dish of heavenly hilsa-eggs ideally matched with the green papaya---all rounded off with sour curd served in a stone bowl and accompanied by date-molasses in case you prefer it sweetened. The so-called Indian food served in the fashionable hotels follows the Mughal-cum-Punjabi style; even the cheaper eating houses are better off with Lahore or Lucknow or Madras styles of cookery. As for the "smart" Bengali hostess who loves to entertain, she will produce a "neutral" and streamlined dinner when she invites an assortment of friends including some from overseas. Out of consideration for the habits of the Occidental---his timorous approach to spices and his ineptitude in the use of his fingers---she will probably serve a tomato-soup with cream, the bone-free and rather insipid bhetki baked or fried, pistachioed pilau instead of plain rice or roti or that unique creation of Bengal, the swollen pan-broiled luchi, which would have gone splendidly with her mutton-roast or stuffed chicken. There will be a salad of raw vegetables and maybe a seductive tutti-frutti, supplied by a Park Street creamery---in short, her menu will be a repetition of the usual offering of Western-style hotels in India. She will probably introduce one or two local touches by flavouring the salad with lime-juice, or adding slices of the sun-ripened langra mango to the ice but there will be nothing specifically Bengali in the whole arrangement. So it is that a foreigner who spends days and weeks at the Grand or Great Eastern, takes photos, makes a documentary movie, and even writes a book on going back, often boards his home-bound jet without having tasted a morsel of genuine Bengali food. But perhaps this is only natural. What I have mentioned as a drawback of Bengali food is really also its virtue; if you cannot commercialize it, you cannot vulgarize it either. Any attempt to put it on the Universal Common Market would mean a violation of its dharma, an outrage on the very it-ness of it. It is a product of the home and family-ties, of personal relationships---as much of science as of human affection, as much of age-old wisdom as of an intuitive response to Nature. The food of every region is related to the local climate, but where the techniques of refrigeration and transportation have been perfected, one can eat almost anything one likes any day of the year---out of cans and packs, of course---a situation unthinkable in India. Lacking the blessings and the bane of an advanced technology, India still remains a land where food is attuned to the seasons and even the fluctuations in weather. A whole system of seasonal foods prevails in Bengal, of which our foreign friend can form no idea, unless he has lived in a Bengali home where life is "traditional and ceremonious"---not as an aloof paying guest but a member of the family, and eaten the same food as the others. In order to know what Bengali food is, you must welcome the spring by beginning your mid-day meal with a few fried margosa leaves, which retain their delicately bitter taste for only a week or two in early March, and end the meal with a sour-sweet ambal of green mangoes. The thing for the height of summer is a spoonful of pure stinging home-made kasundi [7] which must be mixed with a dark-green sag and, again, your first mouthful of rice. Summer is also the time for tasting the real bitter watery hingcha, an excellent aperitif, as refreshing as a glass of iced Campari on a June day in Rome. A day of crashing rain evokes the kedgeree---rice and lentils boiled together with eggs and potatoes and the sweet onion, enjoyable even without fish or meat. The mark of autumn is the tender arum-stalk cooked with gram and coconut-chips, and the slippery-tasting astringent chalita fruit stewed in molasses. In winter you must eat a portion of the big buttery brinjal [8] scorched in a charcoal fire, and slices of the tangy red radish embedded in your dal or ambal. And in case there is an orthodox widow in the family, you must---absolutely must---beg her to give you samples of what she cooks for herself. Have no fear about approaching her; for even if she doesn't let you enter her kitchen she will be generous in hospitality. I rejoice that the rigours imposed on the Hindu widow are now much relaxed, at least in the urban areas; I look forward to the day when the institution of widowhood will disappear. Yet I cannot suppress a nostalgic sigh for the dainties I tasted in my boyhood---offerings from the separate kitchen assigned to widows. I wish I had time to dwell on the savouries and condiments---the handiwork of widows and elderly wives freed from the trouble of tending the young---preserves for the whole family made of the plum, the lime, the guava, the green and the ripe mango, the marme1os, the myrobalan, and the acid tamarind blackened and mellowed by age, into which have entered various degrees of sweetness, sourness, and astringency.
(contd)
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