THIS ABOVE ALL
A foodie’s journey
KHUSHWANT SINGH

I am a small but fussy eater, a gourmet not a gourmand. I eat very little during the day but like my dinner to be a one-course meal, followed by a dessert. I try out different kinds of cuisine, Indian and foreign. I am not a vegetarian; I prefer fish preparations to chicken or meat. I am blessed with a gifted cook, a Garhwali, Chandan Singh Pundir, who has been with me for more than 50 years. My wife used to read out recipes of Indian, French or Italian dishes to him. He would produce them better than chefs of five- star hotels.

My wife has been gone for several years. Chandan Singh still manages to cook whatever I fancy to perfection. I say all this as a prelude to my comments on Chitrita Banerji’s latest book — Eating India: Exploring a Nation’s Cuisine (Penguin). She is an internationally recognised authority on Bengali food. Her earlier publications — Life and Food in Bengal, Memories of Women, Food and Ritual — were widely acclaimed in America and Europe. In Eating India she takes readers on a Bharat darshan, introducing them to people, their history, religions, rituals and food preferences. Needless to say, her Sonar Bangla wins the Oscar for the best the world has to offer in the way of gourmet delights. Bengalis on both sides of the divide, between West Bengal and Bangladesh, are fussy eaters.

They know the many kinds of fresh water fish and crustacea and ways to cook them. The hilsa from the Padma or the Ganga is the queen of all fishes. For most of inland India, one kind of fish is like any other, it is mucchee. The only way to cook it is to fry it in oil, and the only way to eat it to dip bits of it in pudeena or imli chutney. Bengalis also produce the best of desserts—sandesh, rasgullas, cham cham and ras malai. She tells us that these mouth-watering delicacies evolved from the Portuguese love for cottage cheese in their earliest settlements in Bengal.

I go along with her but am baffled that a few years ago Kolkata, which has excellent restaurants specialising in Mughlai, Chinese, French and Italian food, did not have a restaurant specialising in Bengali cuisine. Nor why you can eat tastier hilsa in Dhaka than in Kolkata or elsewhere.
Her travelogue takes us to Goa. Here, as could be expected, Portuguese
Catholic predominance tickled the Goan tastebuds. Just about everything
from pao (bread) eaten with vindaloo based on pig meat to the 117
varieties of fish they eat has an Iberian touch. But instead of the banana
leaf on which Bengalis prefer to eat with their fingers dipping into mounds of rice, they eat on metal or china plates and wash it down with copious intakes of beer and coconut or cashewnut Feni.

So down to the idli-dosa-sambhar-rasam of Dravidistan, by train and car, sampling food at roadside eateries and never finding anything wrong with what she ate. The only cuisine she did not find worth praising is Punjabi. Her experience was limited to eating at the Guru-ka-Langar in Amritsar's Golden Temple, which feeds many thousands at every sitting and in my home in Delhi. The only Punjabi food I eat during winter months is sarson ka saag and gajar ka halwa.

We did not have either on the menu when we celebrated her birthday while she was our house guest. Chitrita Banerji's enthusiasm for Indian food can be ascribed to homesickness. She lives in Boston with her doctor-husband and her widowed mother. She misses her sunny homeland. She is not a great eater as we might conclude after reading her book, but a selective one. She preserves her curvaceous figure and is as palatable a dish she writes about with the sauciest eyes sparkling with mischief. Her book makes a delightful reading.

Benazir: A requiem

(Courtesy: Imtiaz Chowdhry, Kolkata)

Matrimonial

The parents of a girl went to meet the father of the boy they had in mind
for their daughter, and asked him: "Apka beta padha likha kitna hai?" – (how much can your son read or write?). The boy’s father replied: "Padha to nahin hai (he cannot read), magar likkha zaroor hai( but he is certain written about)".

"How can that be?" asked the girl's father.

"When he was born his name was entered in the records of the municipality.

(Contributed by Gurdarshan Singh, Chandigarh)