Bong Mom's Cookbook by Sandeepa Datta Mukherjee

Author:Sandeepa Datta Mukherjee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers India
Published: 2013-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

The Fish

Though I take umbrage if random people ask me what I eat other than fish, the fact that a Bengali eats a lot of fish is not really untrue. Growing up, we were always a family who ate fish for both lunch and dinner most days. A good fish made my mother happy. If she was singing Rabindrasangeet in the kitchen, it could only mean one thing: the fish talked to her.

My rite of passage as a fishy Bong started at the tender age of six months when I was handed a huge fried head of fish on a silver platter. That was my Annaprashan, my moment of introduction to the world of food in a Bengali home. Things got more intense when, as small kids, we were pushed into the barbaric activity of eating fish head with the incentive that devouring it (especially the brain) would enrich our brains and also make our vision stronger. ‘Khub buddhi hobe,’ my Ma insisted. What I would do with so much intelligence was a question I never asked.

But my personal love affair with fish started only when we moved to a small township on the banks of the river Ganga some time between my tween and teen years.

It was a quiet town, far from the trappings of the city. Life there was slow and the mornings rolled out leisurely like a well rounded luchi. Grocery was not just relegated to weekends; fresh veggies and fish were brought home every morning from the local market which shimmered with vibrant greens, reds and purples on winter mornings.

My father was no gourmand, but the haat beckoned to him and on cold winter mornings he would walk all the way; across the still-wet grass of the football field where the jatra companies, the travelling theatres, had set up their tents, around the small town library to the haat where the farmers from nearby villages would set up their produce. Pristine nun-like white cauliflowers nestled in their green stalks, plump tomatoes snuggled with sexy orange carrots, the wet earth still clinging to their stumps. And then there was the fish, scales glinting in the morning sun like shiny quarters, their tails still flipping the last beats. Most days Baba would come back with big cloth bags filled with a variety of vegetables and a smaller nylon bag with cut pieces of fish like rui or katla. Baba was not adventurous about his fish and always stuck to the larger fish – kaata maachh, as they were called. While the vegetable bag went into the kitchen, the smaller fish bag found its place under the lone water tap in the backyard, where it would be washed every day and dried in the sun to be reused the next morning.

A little later in the day, when the sun was high and the day had fallen into its slow pace only broken by the calls of the ghughoo in the mango tree, the odd fisherman with gleaming silver in his basket would do the rounds of our town to sell his remaining catch.

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