bengali recipes

What makes a Bengali a Bengali? The answer always seems to lie in the fish. As a typical Bengali who spent his whole life trying to avoid fish, I always felt that he wasn’t Bengali enough because he didn’t salivate at the prospect of koi-maach. By moving to America, I thought I had escaped the accusing gaze of the bead-eyed rui. And then I find myself at an Asian fish market in San Francisco wistfully looking at mounds of silvery fish. We grew up in communities of taste, says Prof. Krishnendu Ray. He is subconsciously embedded. In the act of migration, that community of tastes is suddenly lost.

Teacher. King should know. After coming to the US to study the political economy of development and underdevelopment, was he, as he says, assailed by that disreputable phenomenon? Nostalgia or idealization of home cooking? What began as his personal journey dealing with the loss of shukto and ilish on a monsoon afternoon has now become the first real study of food and memories in Bengali-American homes. The migrant’s table?

Teacher. Ray sent out a survey to around 1000 Bengali families with questions like? What was yesterday’s lunch at your house? and What is your weekly fish bill? He hoped the answers would tell him not only what to expect for dinner on a typical night at the Banerjee home in New Jersey, but also some larger issues of immigration and assimilation.

It found that Bengali Americans spent an average of $91 a week at the grocery store and another $14 at a specialty Asian market. Dinner was aggressively Bengali. Lunch was a mixed bag. Breakfast consisted of toast and cereal. Single men reluctantly learn American eating habits, such as deli meats and cold cereals, but reaffirm their Bengali style after marriage. Are women willing to play a little more with American food? think turkey samosa. Women still do most of the cooking, although 65 percent have professional credentials or a master’s degree. But almost half have jobs instead of pursuing a career. Only 10 percent of married men do the shopping on their own.

The act of migrating also suddenly opens up a supermarket of possibilities. Families that used to eat chicken once a week can now eat it every day. Take fish. A US AID survey in 1972 found that 41 percent of upper-middle-class households in Calcutta ate fish for lunch on a typical weekday. At dinner in Bengali-American households, that rises to 63 percent. Sixty-six percent has meat.

But abundance does not mean it is the same. Fish is plentiful in America, but Bengalis like whole freshwater fish. Fish fillets and steaks are just not gada and peti. Doesn’t taste the same, says Ray. But what people really miss are other memories. Sure, potol and mocha can be hard to find, but sometimes, more than the food, it’s the associations.

Saraswati Puja won’t be the same without lotus- or fish-shaped khichuri or sandesh, says Bharti Kirchner, author of The Healthy Cuisine of India Recipes from the Bengal Region. The problem for Bengalis is that Bengali food is not even available in Indian restaurants. Regional cuisine was preserved in homes, while restaurants in India made Mughlai cuisine the standard, says Kirchner. Even at a Bengali conference in Atlantic City in 2000, there were six food vendors? three served pizza, sandwiches and pretzels, the other three served south indian, north indian and bhelpuri. No alur dom, no luchis, forget about doi-potol.

On one level, being hard to find gives value to food, Ray says, because food is the mythologizing of the mundane. This is why immigrants become vocal about street food like puchka or jhal muri, which they endlessly try to replicate. But the damn things never taste like the jhal muri I had on the train? Ray laughs.

Nirmalya Modak helped start the first Bengali restaurant, Charulata, in the San Francisco Bay Area. While Charulata served lau-chingri and shorshe-ilish, the occasional customer still ordered naan. “During Durga Puja there were a lot of people, Modak recalls. People said, let’s buy luchi and kasha meat curry in Charulata. It will be like Pujas in Kolkata. But eventually, Charulata went out of business, unable to trust Bengali nostalgia as a viable business model. There are only about 30,000 Bengalis in the United States. And if you include Bangladeshis, the numbers are closer to 100,000, says Ray.

Because it is really only available at home, as it is an ethnic secret that is not readily available commercially, Bengali food becomes where the immigration angst really cooks. ?Parents worry that if their children don’t like shukto they will never grow up Bengali, says Ray. Of course, he laughs, in Calcutta the same parents might have longed for kebabs at Nizam’s or pastries from New Market instead of shukto and daal-bhaat at home.

At some level, assimilation is inevitable. Even when children identify with their culture, it is probably more Indian than Bengali. So they will eat samosas instead of phulkopir singhara, says Ray. He realizes it most clearly when he brings his own four-year-old son to India. His typical menu of macaroni and cheese with his daal bhaat. His comfort food is now truly Bengali-American.

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