Bengal and the East

The east of India is a country of rivers and rain: the Ganges and the Brahmaputra divide into a delta of channels, ponds and wetlands before reaching the Bay of Bengal, and the cooking of Bengal, Odisha and Assam grew from that water. Rice and fish are the base of the table, with mustard, the oil pressed from it, and a short list of whole spices set against them. The region was divided in 1947, and the Bengali kitchen today belongs to both West Bengal in India and Bangladesh.

The Bengali table is built on rice and fish, and the proverb that a Bengali is made of both is only a little exaggerated. Rohu Labeo rohita and the other carps come from the village pond, while hilsa Tenualosa ilisha, which runs up the rivers in the monsoon, is the fish the region prizes above the rest. It is cooked in many ways: steamed in mustard paste, simmered thinly in a jhol, or wrapped and cooked in leaf. Machher jhol, the everyday fish stew, is thin, light and golden with turmeric Curcuma longa, and it is eaten with plain rice. Bharadwaj, writing of the region, places the mustard seed and its oil at the centre of this cooking, and the pungency of mustard Brassica juncea, ground raw with green chilli, is where many Bengali fish dishes live or die. The Bengali kitchen also keeps its own way of ordering a meal. Courses run from bitter to sweet: a bitter preparation of gourd or leaves begins the meal, then dal, fried vegetables, the fish, and last the chutney and the sweets. Panch phoron, the blend of five whole seeds (fenugreek Trigonella foenum-graecum, nigella, cumin, black mustard and fennel), is fried in hot oil at the start of a dish and flavours vegetables and dals alike. Vegetables are cooked with great care for the whole plant: banana flower, green papaya, the stems and leaves of greens, and the gourds of the monsoon each have their dish. Widows of the upper castes kept a strictly vegetarian kitchen without onion or garlic, and that discipline produced a distinguished body of vegetable cooking beside the fish tradition. Sweets are the region's other great craft. Milk is curdled and the curd worked into chhena, from which come the rasogolla, sandesh and the many sweets of the Calcutta confectioner. Bengal rasogolla and Odisha rasagola are each protected as a Geographical Indication in its own right, and the two states have long held that the sweet is theirs. Date palm jaggery, gathered in the cold months, flavours sweets and pithas, the rice cakes of the winter festivals. Odisha, to the south, keeps a temple cuisine of its own, in the kitchens of the Jagannath temple at Puri, and a lighter, less pungent style of fish and vegetable cooking at home. Assam, beyond the delta, cooks with little oil and few dry spices: fish soured with tomato or lemon, greens, bamboo shoot, and the alkaline preparation called khar, made by filtering the ash of dried banana peel. The tea gardens of Assam and of Darjeeling, whose name is protected as a Geographical Indication, belong to the same eastern history, as a trade begun under the British. Partition in 1947 moved people and kitchens across the new border, and the Bengali table is now written in two countries. The cooking of the Hindu and Muslim households of the delta shared its rice, fish and mustard, and differed in the use of meat, richer spicing and the Mughal inheritance in dishes such as the biryani of Calcutta, a city that took its style from the exiled court of Wajid Ali Shah at Metiabruz.

A Bengali meal is eaten in sequence, with the bitter first and the sweet last, and rice is the constant under every course. Mustard gives the characteristic heat, a sharp pungency that rises through the nose rather than burning on the tongue, and it sits against the sweetness of fresh river fish and the gentle spicing of panch phoron. The meal ends with a sweet of curdled milk, and in the cold months with date palm jaggery.