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 friends or family members, coming to Delhi from Calcutta to make a small detour to Krishnanagar. For that’s where you get the best sarbhaja and sarpuria, two sweets that I swear by. You get them elsewhere, of course — but you just can’t beat the sweets of Krishnanagar.I visit krishnanagar almost every time i visit balurghat- as it comes in the way.I love the lunch in krishnagar- i remember nodir-macher jhol ,crispy allo bhaaja, begun bhaaja ,mosur dal ar aatop chaler bhat.yummy!
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 thoug
ht 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.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. Take the kolmi shaak — long leafy water spinach — which grows in abundance in fertile Hooghly. So there’s a dish called torotaja kolmi bora, or fresh balls of kolmi leaves. This is the season when the kolmi shaak is widely available in the region. The greens, when deep-fried, serve as a great side dish with rice and dal. Bankura and Birbhum are known for their posto 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 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 . From Burdwan, you can get 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 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. Get some medium sized pompfret and cook it with posto. The ensuing dish — postomakha roopchanda — is a popular Bankura dish. 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.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.
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