Pelob piyaj posto

My demands have always been modest. I never ask for those long-eared horses of Bankura, or intricately woven kantha shawls from Santiniketan if anyone ever comes visiting from Bengal. I, however, do often ask sundry friends coming to Delhi from Calcutta to make a small detour to Krishnanagar. For that’s where you get the best sarbhaja and sarpuria, two sublime sweets that I swear by. You get them elsewhere, of course — but you just can’t beat the sweets of Krishnanagar.

Actually, it is quite interesting how districts and towns outside Calcutta are widely known for a special dish or two. If Krishnanagar is famous for its sweets cooked with the cream of milk, a school of thought contends that for the best kanchagolla, a sweet that is thankfully now easy to get even in small sweet shops in Delhi, you have to go all the way to the North 24 Parganas.

If you are a newcomer to Burdwan, you’ll be surprised to find shacks of all sizes and shapes adorning the highway outside the town. This is Shaktigarh, a place famous for its langcha, which is a kind of an elongated gulab jamun prepared with khoya and sugar syrup. The names of the shops are all very intriguing — Langcha Palace, Langcha Corner, Langcha Terrace and what have you.

Mourolar tok

Burdwan itself is renowned for two sweet dishes — sitabhog and mihidana. The former is white and cooked with rice powder and chhana and the latter is yellow, and prepared with little grains of besan — the reason why I am told the two together are often called bhaat and dal!

But the interiors are not just known for their sweets. Chef Rupam Banik, who has done some research into the food of the districts with the help of other chefs at the Peerless Inn in Calcutta, has come up with quite an innovative menu of some select dishes at Aaheli, the hotel’s restaurant that serves Bengali food. He calls the festival Jela Parikrama — or a district tour.

Take the kolmi shaak — long leafy water spinach — which grows in abundance in fertile Hooghly. So the chef and his team offer a dish called torotaja kolmi bora, or fresh balls of kolmi leaves, on the menu. This is the season when the kolmi shaak is widely available in the region, says Chef Banik. The greens, when deep-fried, serve as a great side dish with rice and dal.

Bankura and Birbhum are known for their posto (or poppy seed) dishes — a fondness that some believe harks back to the time of the opium trade in British-ruled Bihar and Bengal. So you have Bankura’s pelob piyaj posto, a vegetarian dish of poppy seed paste cooked with onions, green chillies, onion seeds and ginger paste in mustard oil.

But what’s pelob, I asked Chef Banik with some interest. I knew piyaj (onion) and posto, but pelob was a word that I was yet to encounter. “It’s a word that’s locally used to denote something that’s been lovingly done,” he tells me.

Kanchagolla

I like what the chef has conjured up as part of the district tour — clearly with a lot of pelob! From Burdwan, he has selected a dish of aar fish, cooked with wax gourd, and from Midnapur, a dish of koi fish cooked in a leaf. The jheengey chingri of South 24 Parganas consists of small shrimps and ridged gourd cooked in mustard oil with turmeric, onion, garlic, ginger, chillies and chopped tomatoes — and finally tempered with a pinch of garam masala and chopped coriander.

Hooghly offers enchor chingrir bahar — a dish of shredded raw jackfruit and shrimps — and Midnapur is represented by its mourolar tok, small mourala fish in a sweet and tart gravy.

The menu has some delicacies — including a chitol dhoka of Coochbehar. The chitol is a much loved fish, the top part is full of bones and the stomach smooth as a baby’s cheeks. Chef Banik takes a pomfret and cooks it with posto. The ensuing dish — postomakha roopchanda — is a popular Bankura dish, he holds. Of course, it’s another matter that the pomfret is a sea fish and can’t be a part of the indigenous Bankura cuisine. But the fish is now easily available everywhere, and Bengalis have developed a taste for it, the chef contends.

But clearly the posto figures prominently in most parts of Bengal. And there are of course all kinds of ways of cooking it — as fried balls, ground raw with mustard oil and chillies, with shrimps and meat — and a variety of vegetables from bottle gourd to potatoes.

Some would say that these are dishes that are available in all parts of Bengal. But then a cuisine is finally the sum total of all that the districts have to offer. It’s time we doffed our caps to them.

Sorer Nadu

Ingredients (to serve 4)

• 1litre milk • 50gm sugar

Method

Boil the milk. Remove the creamy layer when it comes to the top and keep aside. Repeat the process till the milk gets over. Now mix sugar with this cream. Make little dumplings.

Postomakha Roopchanda

Ingredients (to serve 4)

• 1kg pomfret fish (each piece of 250gm) • 100ml mustard oil • 2tsp turmeric powder • 2tsp green chilli paste • 4tbs posto (poppy seed) paste • Onion seeds, a pinch • 50gm chopped onion • 10gm ginger paste • Salt to taste

Method

Heat the oil, fry the fish and keep aside. Heat some oil, add onion seeds and chopped onions. Fry till golden and then add the ginger paste, turmeric powder, salt and green chilli paste. Then put the posto paste and cook it for 10 minutes on a slow flame. Add 150ml water, and then the fried pomfret. Cook till the posto turns dry. Serve hot with rice.