Total disclosure, thrice over. I am a cookbook addict. They spell perfect
bedtime reading to me. I do not cook Bengali food at home. Whenever I
want some desperately, I drop in on friends who have Bengali mothers. Yes, Bong
moms.
Believe it or not, I have never
read a cookbook that made me laugh out loud at midnight or into the wee hours.
Till now. For starters, sample this:
Question: What do Bongs eat?
Answer: Anything and everything, as
long as it is followed by Gelusil, Pudin Hara, Jowaner Aarak or Nux Vom 30.
Sandeepa Mukherjee Datta’s got
the recipe just right. She’s a New Jersey-based engineer who set up her own
blog, Bong Mom’s Cookbook, in October 2006. It gets 120,000 hits a month. In a
new avatar, it is this delicious, authentic, LOL book for Bongs – and the
larger world beyond.
Her heady mix? One part US-based
nostalgia for Bangali cookery or ranna. Two parts real-time motherly zest
for Sukumar Ray and rooted-in-India culture. Garnished liberally with humorous
anecdotes, starring an extended cast of family and friends, her husband (a.k.a.
H-man), and her two twinkle-tongued little daughters. Her light touch ensures
that the fare dished up works like magic. Via kitchen and blog, she busts the
myth that Bengalis survive on a diet of fish and rosogollas.
Sandeepa deftly adapts traditional
fare to everyday American reality. For instance, tossing mushrooms into a
poppyseed-paste aloo posto. Just as
smoothly, she whips up an image beyond Spiderman on weekend TV during her
childhood: “Ma spent those mornings
entirely in the kitchen, her cotton sari damp and turmeric-stained, smelling
strongly of Sunday, of mutton curry.” It
makes you want to cook Mangsho’r Jhol at once.
A tech-savvy woman, Sandeepa sketches in Excel sheet estimates of mutton/
per head in grams as she toils over a dinner menu for 60 to mark her little
daughter’s birthday. She evokes her cross-legged
Baba packing her flight-to-the-west suitcase with a pressure cooker, mustard
oil and Bela De’s cookbooks in Bangla. She recalls her widowed Choto Dida feeding
her leftover ruti (chappati) with the bati chorchori of potatoes that weaves through millions of Bengali
childhoods. Her diary-like stories make time and place collapse in a trice, creating
a notion of Bengaliness sans borders.
My favourite anecdote recreates the melodious
tinkling of red and green glass bangles on the wrists of Manu’r Ma, the
household help, as sun-dipped colours dance on the floor. With the acuity of a
word artist, she brings alive the grinding of posto on the pockmarked black stone sheel-nora . As deftly, she conjures
up memories potent enough for Sandeepa to recreate vegetarian Fridays, a la her
Ma, in the US.
Her recipes worked brilliantly,
whenever I reluctantly took a break from her stories. I tried the Posto’r Bora (poppyseed fritters) and Dhone Pata Chicken that H-man wooed her
with in Bangalore. Her pages occasionally reach beyond boundaries to include
sharing Machha Besara (an Odia fish curry). For, to Sandeepa, food “is life
wrapped in a soft egg roll with slices of crunchy onion and bites of feisty
green chilli. It has something to tell. Always.”
To me, her family-centricity ripples
through this laugh-riddled cookbook. It
is about how Sandeepa mastered Dhokar
Dalna step-by-step from her Ma in Kolkata
over Skype, while the latter concentrated on her maid’s mastery of dust under
the table. Or her Ma’s theories of why pizza-scoffing children are less intelligent
than those on a diet of macher jhol- bhat.
Sandeepa’s attention to detail
seasons her pages. As do her jottings on a perfect onion paste for curry or the
Bengali addiction to mustard. Tongue-in-cheek, she addresses questions like: Are
Bengali Brahmins vegetarian? What do Bongs eat for breakfast? How come folks originally
from East Bengal can eat hilsa on Saraswati Puja, while those from West Bengal
cannot?
She brushes aside carping about her
non-authentic cabbage sabji or the demerits of making bhapa-doi in the oven. Denied
the green chilli chicken at ‘Oh Calcutta!’ en route from Kolkata airport to her
parent’s home, she recreates her own version.
Cook, eat, blog. That was the game
plan when Sandeepa set out on this journey. Her authentic, slice-of-life
sharings of Bengali life in a wired world win over both the reader and the
cook. Take a bow, Bong Mom’s Cookbook,
no matter the avatar.
(Originally published in The Hindu Business Line on June 28, 2013)
