Beginnings- 2

As a child, I remember our parents throwing dinners & get-togethers for friends, where along with one or two non-veg dishes, there were more than five or six vegetarian fares, all great to look at and delicious to taste. Chochodis, dallas, paanch mishali, chhechki, bhaja, tok, jhaal, paturi, kalia, jhol, and so on. And I don't remember anyone cribbing for lack of fish fry. 

But, I find it's different now.

Lately, I have noticed that the fondness for non vegetarian food among Bengalis has turned into a sort of crazy craving. To the extent, that even at the Pujo pandals where Maa Durga is being worshipped as the supreme Mother, chicken, mutton and fish bones lie scattered in a stinking pile. The smell of maacher chop, fish fries and mughlai parathas invade the serene pujo atmosphere. The fragrance of the flowers, camphor, the dhuno, the shanti’r jol, are all masked by the smell of the fish. Kind of disrupts the sanctity of the worship, if you ask me.

Then again, it is a sarbojonik place and people are free to eat what they want. Many non-Bengalis flock the place only to gorge on the maach maangsho and chicken. But even in the few Bengali restaurants hat have opened, the menu isn’t balanced. As a result, I find that more and more Bengalis are losing touch with a large chunk of their cuisine and delivering a lopsided view of our food to the rest of the world too.

An intriguing fact about Bengali cuisine is that everything can be turned into a non-vegetarian meal by just adding fish or meat along with the vegetables. So a curry can go either way. Also unlike many Indian vegetarian dishes, which are made adding onions & garlic, in a vegetarian Bong dish one can get the same taste, flavor, and consistency, without an overdose of onions. And there's an interesting history to this- in the past, widows weren’t allowed fish, meat, onions, garlic, masoor dal and pui shaak. So every vegetarian meal that contained onion and garlic had to have another version minus these ingredients. 

This Jamai Shoshti, I was discussing the typical Bong thali with my son-in-law who happens to be a vegetarian Punjabi (yes, we're sailing a similar boat). We all know how popular the Punjabi cuisine is the world over. And like most others, he too thought that Bengali food revolved around fish.  Over the years however, he has tasted and loved the typical vegetarian ghorwa ranna that I have cooked for him. Anyway, it was during this discussion that my daughter and son-in-law came up with the idea that I ought to start a blog about vegetarian Bengali food. So while I supply them with the recipes, nostalgia, factoids and other tidbits, the job of updating the blog shall rest entirely on their technical shoulders. 

And that's how I am here. :-) Let's see where the blog takes me. Do keep visiting. 

Cheers!