Indo-Chinese Food of Kolkata

The Indo-Chinese table of Kolkata grew out of the city's Hakka Chinese community, whose settlement in Bengal is traced to the late eighteenth century, when Chinese labourers and traders came to the Hooghly river ports under the East India Company. Over the following century and a half the community settled in two quarters: the old Chinatown around Bowbazar and Territy Bazaar in the centre of the city, and the tanneries of Tiljala and Tangra to the east, where the leather trade became the community's main livelihood. It was from these quarters, and from the kitchens that served them, that a Chinese cooking recast for Bengali and wider Indian taste passed into the city's streets and restaurants.

The cooking that resulted is best understood as the work of a trading minority adapting its own methods to the markets, palates and ingredients around it. The Hakka cook brought the wok, the cleaver, high flame, soy sauce, and the habit of cooking quickly in small batches. He found in Bengal a population that wanted its food hot, sour, well salted and generous in sauce, and that cooked with ginger, garlic, green chilli and onion in quantities unfamiliar to the southern Chinese kitchen. The dishes shifted accordingly, and Sonal Ved, in Tiffin, treats this meeting as one of the settled strands of the Indian restaurant and snack tradition. The repertoire that took shape is now widely known across India: chilli chicken, in its dry and gravy forms; vegetable manchurian, in which fried balls of minced vegetable are tossed in a thickened soy, garlic and chilli sauce; hakka noodles; and fried rice. The sauces are bound with cornflour, seasoned with soy, vinegar and chilli sauce, and finished with spring onion, so that they coat rather than flow. Each of these dishes was altered in India, and none is a transcription of a dish eaten in China; they are the cooking of a particular place and community, and the name Indo-Chinese is the fair one for them. The tanning quarter of Tangra gave the style a second home, and the restaurants and home kitchens there fed the community and, increasingly, the city that came to eat with it. In the old Chinatown, the early morning market sold breakfast of steamed dumplings, fish balls and soups, a Chinese morning table that lasted alongside the Indo-Chinese restaurant dishes. The two traditions sat side by side: a food kept for the community and a food cooked for the city. The spread of the cuisine beyond Kolkata followed the restaurants, and in time the street cart. By the second half of the twentieth century a wok and a stack of pre-chopped vegetables had become a fixture of the Indian street, and Indo-Chinese food was served from small stalls and large dining rooms alike. Cooks in Mumbai, Delhi and the south each pressed it to local taste, so that the Schezwan sauce of one city and the Chettinad-leaning chilli of another are variants of a single idea. The Kolkata kitchen remains its point of origin and, for many cooks, the reference by which the others are judged.

The taste of Indo-Chinese food rests on a balance of salt, heat, sourness and a little sweetness, with soy sauce, vinegar, chilli and a large quantity of garlic and ginger carrying the dish. The texture matters as much: vegetables and meat are cooked fast over a high flame so that they stay crisp at the edge, and the sauce is thickened with cornflour until it clings. At the table the dishes are usually shared, a dry chilli dish or manchurian set beside a plate of fried rice or noodles, and in Kolkata they are eaten as readily from a street stall as in a dining room.