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226 pages

English

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The Calcutta Cookbook Is Much More Than A Cookery BookIt Is A Culinary Chronicle Of Travellers And Traders Who Built The City That Job Charnock Founded. Calcutta 'S Chronicle Began On A Hot, Wet August Afternoon In 1690 When A Hungry Charnock Climbed Off His Ship On To The Steps Of A Muddy Ghat. The River Was Hooghly And The Place Sutanati The Story Of Calcutta Is Told By Three Food LoversThe Late Gourmet Chef And Author Of Bangla Ranna, Minakshi Das Gupta, And Feature Writers Bunny Gupta And Jaya ChaliahWho Have Collected Recipes From All Over The World. Many Of These Are Family Secrets Of Calcuttans Who Have Recreated Armenian, Jewish, Arabian, European, Chinese And Tibetan Dishes With Distinct Calcutta Flavour. Through Over Two Hundred Tried And Tested Recipes Ranging From The Delicious Bengali Chingri Maacher Malai Curry To The Biryani And Kebabs Of Kabul, And The Temperado, Vindaloo And Sorpotel Of Goa, Calcutta Unfolds As A GourmetS Paradise

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India

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Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	14 octobre 2000
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9789351181491
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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MINAKSHIE DAS GUPTA BUNNY GUPTA JAYA CHALIHA
The Calcutta Cookbook
A Treasury of over 200 Recipes from Pavement to Palace
Illustrations by Utpal Basu
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Unlidding the Pot
Dos and Don ts
Chapter 1 - A History and Philosophy of Food
Chapter 2 - Bangla Ranna
Chapter 3 - Dastar Khwan
Chapter 4 - Firinghee Flavours
Chapter 5 - Bawarcheekhana
Chapter 6 - Oodles of Noodles
Chapter 7 - A Cosmopolitan Jigsaw
Chapter 8 - Tables Turn
Footnotes
Chapter 2 - Bangla Ranna
Chapter 4 - Firinghee Flavours
Chapter 7 - A Cosmopolitan Jigsaw
Table of Foods
Glossary
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE CALCUTTA COOKBOOK
Minakshie Das Gupta s flair for cooking and culinary skills were hereditary. Her grandmother and mother are still remembered as great cooks. She had her first cooking lessons in her mother s kitchen in Calcutta when she was knee-high. Her much-acclaimed book, Bangla Ranna was the first collection of Bengali and Anglo-Indian recipes presented in a scientific format. She died in 1994 and The Calcutta Cookbook was the culmination of a lifetime of interest in food from all over the world, particularly from Calcutta where she was born.
Bunny Gupta and Jaya Chaliha are free-lance journalists and writers. Bunny is also a teacher and an innovative cook. Jaya works with craftspersons and underpriviledged women and children. They have been writing together for over a decade. They enjoy and love the cosmopolitan flavour of Calcutta.

Unlidding the Pot
The Calcutta Cookbook is more than a cookbook. It is a culinary chronicle of travellers and traders, many of whom built the city of Calcutta and its distinctive cuisines.
For the first time, recipes from the Bay of Biscay to the China Sea and from Central Asia and Tibet to Sri Lanka, have been tasted, tried and collected in a golden treasury for the cook and the collector.
We have found a wealth of legends and archival material that go back to ancient times. We have returned to the present via oral history, true life stories and personal diaries and notebooks.
We have had the privilege of talking to the elders in different groups in our city about their food philosophy and habits. We have enjoyed their hospitality, savouring an invasion of flavours from Arabia, Afghanistan, Europe, China, Tibet and from nearer home.
Many of the recipes in the book are family secrets from the kitchens of Calcuttans. Armenian, Jewish and Portuguese recipes come with a distinctive Calcutta flavour as do others. Sometimes our attention has been drawn to local substitutes such as crayfish for lobster and molasses for demerara sugar. Often the original ingredient has been forgotten and a new dish created. Prawn temperado is malai curry in some homes.
The manner of presenting these recipes may appear awkward. We request you to bear in mind that these are often experiments by countless men and women whose experiences, in the bazaar and the kitchen, have been recorded as faithfully as practicable for you to try them out in the same spirit. We hope you will be able to cook them without much difficulty. Wherever the cuisine originated, there were limitations of local meats and vegetables, oils and herbs. If you are at a loss for the prescribed ingredient, let your imagination find a substitute and invent a new recipe for the cooking pot.
We have tried to make the book readable from the first page to the last and therefore you will find departures from conventional styles. Another consideration in the difficult task of choosing the recipes has been with a view to preparing a meal with dishes from one chapter or a medley from many. We have planned this menu: Chinese chicken corn soup, bawarchee s smoked fish and the American coleslaw, Jewish mahashash, moghlai shami kebabs ending with the perennial Bengali speciality, mishti doi or mango or tipari (gooseberry) fool in season.
We thank David Davidar, Renuka Chatterjee and Anubha C. Doyle, our publisher and editors for helping us through the teething troubles of this book with infinite patience and understanding.
Calcutta
Poila Baisak, 1401 Bangabda
Dos and Don ts
There are a few basic ground rules for using the recipes in this book. Wash rice and leafy vegetables several times before putting them in the pot. For a perfect pot of rice, add half a teaspoon of salt to the water before it comes to the boil and allow to simmer for half an hour. A few drops of lime juice added during the cooking helps to keep the grains firm. Remove the scum rising to the top of the pot while boiling rice or dal. Heat the oil to smoking before adding the tempering or phoron and immediately lower the heat to prevent burning. Cover the dish after the phoron has been added to get the full flavour of the spices. Add hot water to gravy to enhance the flavour. Cook vegetables on low heat and avoid adding water, if possible. The cooking medium for all the dishes in this book is refined vegetable oil unless otherwise specified. Spices mentioned in recipes, including turmeric, are used powdered unless otherwise specified. Use glass or ceramic dishes for marinating.
The cooking pots of Calcutta have a personality and cannot be standardized. Some temper their cooking in the beginning, others reserve it for the end. Some add sugar to their dals, others would not dream of doing so. We have tried to take the middle path to suit every palate.
The measurements used are basic:
1 cup is 250 grams
1 teaspoon (tsp) is 5 grams
1 tablespoon (tbsp) is 10 grams
1 egg cup is cup or 3 tablespoons
Dessertspoon has been explained in Mona
Benham s recipe for Fowl Curry Koormah in Chapter 5.1 dessertspoon is equal to 1 tablespoon as in the text. Mona Benham uses tablespoon to mean a larger spoon, normally used for serving, equal to 2 dessertspoons. handhot is 100 F, 36 C
In the modern kitchen, the grinding stone has been replaced by the mixer-grinder.
As with the method, so with the words. Many of the recipes have been collected either verbally or from notebooks. We have tried not to change the wording, so there is a variety of measurements, like handful , and temperatures, like handhot . Read a recipe twice before you start to cook.
Chapter 1
A History and Philosophy of Food
Myths, Beliefs and Rituals
Calcutta s chronicle began on a hot, wet August afternoon in 1690 when a hungry Job Charnock climbed off his ship on to the steps of a muddy ghat (landing stage). Charnock was a rough and ready East India Company factor and the ghat a common architectural feature of India s river-banks. The river was the Hooghly and the place Sutanati, one of the three principal villages which became Calcutta. Sutanati, already a booming cotton yarn market, is still the commercial centre of Calcutta. Once the capital of British India, Calcutta is at present the first city of the eastern state of West Bengal. Just south of the Tropic of Cancer, the metropolis has spread out on either side of the river.
It is said that Charnock Sahib was served khichuri, a meal of rice and dal cooked together in a terracotta handi (cooking pot), by a flabbergasted villager. The spontaneous sharing of a meal with an unexpected guest is the hospitality so characteristic of the Indian householder. Little did Charnock know that his lunch of khichuri was the gastronomical link through most of India.
There was a time when Calcutta was part of the great Sunderbans bordering the Bay of Bengal, the largest estuarine delta in the world. The inhabitants of this marshy mangrove swamp lived off a diet of the fruits they gathered and the animals they hunted. In ancient times, the hunter s wife dug the earth for arum root, waded the ponds and marshlands for aquatic plants and caught tiny shrimps and molluscs. She took her gatherings home to complement her husband s shikar of mongoose, wild boar, turtle, iguana, hare and porcupine. If lucky, she would barbecue a haunch of deer.
The Bengalis were amongst the foremost maritime people of the subcontinent. They navigated the rivers and seas and caught vast netfuls of fish and crustaceans, the freshwater variety in particular.
Of the wild grasses that grew in profusion, rice was perhaps the only one that yielded a grain fit to eat and was cultivated. We know that lentils were cooked, that sugar cane and coconut were ingredients and that ginger, long pepper, sesame and turmeric were added for their medicinal properties and to titillate the palate. Sesame oil was the cooking medium. Native fruits like the hog plum, the white, yellow, bitter and ridged gourds and yam were favourites.
Then the Aryans arrived from Central Asia. They had invaded northern India in the second millennium BC and reached Bengal much later, after the sixth century BC . They were attracted to the Gangetic-Brahmaputra delta by the fertility of the soil and the regular and abundant monsoon. The Aryans were now ready for empire-building. Our history books tell us that the first imperial formations were in Magadha (modern Bihar). It was only in eastern India, in the rice growing belt, that populations were large enough to support kingdoms which evolved into empires . The Aryans planted and reaped the natural wealth of the fertile land criss-crossed by rivers rich in fish.
They introduced Vedic rituals in the preparation, serving and eating of food. In turn, they fell in love with the tropical fruits-the mango, the jackfruit, the wood apple, the coconut and the ubiquitous banana. With care and artistry, the bounty of southern Bengal was transformed into delectable dishes-sweet and savoury-fit for the gods.
As in many other religions, the central ritual of the Vedic and Brahmanic period was a sacramental meal. Brahmins and Kshatriyas, kings and princes gathered in a formal assembly around the homa (sacrificial fire). The gods were invoked through chants to join them. Agni, the God of Fire carried the food offerings in their subt