Snacking on Bengali savouries
Biting into a mutton chop one pleasant evening, I got thinking about this delightful snack that eastern India revels in. A chop is not to be confused with the western lamb chop, or mutton chaap, or something indescribable called a soya chaap. This chop is essentially a crumbed or fried ball with a delicious stuffing — of minced meat, or banana florets, or beetroot and potatoes, and so on. The chop I was demolishing was part of a meal curated by a Bengali foodie, Chitra Ghosh, for a festival at the India International Centre in Delhi. The crumby casing was crunchy and the meat filling had been cooked just right — fragrant with spices, but not overwhelmingly so, and nicely moist.
As I absent-mindedly tried out a fish fry, I got transported to the world of vegetarian and non-vegetarian Bengali savouries that are served as snacks, especially during this festive season — from the Pujas to Diwali, and beyond. Chops and cutlets are the more popular snacks, which you even get in many sweetshops. But there are a host of other snacks. The Bengali singara, for one, is superb. The potato, the most common stuffing, is not mashed, but diced into small pieces, and sometimes cooked with the skin. You get cauliflower florets as a filling, too, and, recently, I had the most delicious singara — with chopped shrimps inside — at the Bengali restaurant 6, Ballygunge Place, in Delhi. The casing was crispy, and the prawn filling was light and crunchy.
What makes these snacks so memorable, I think, is the fact that they are of so many kinds, and have different origins. From simple Bengali snacks — often prepared with puffed rice or pressed rice, mustard oil, some peanuts, kala chana, onions and chillies — to Anglo-Indian (think of meat and coconut patties, potato chops with minced meat fillings) and Ramzan savouries (layered Mughlai parantha, flaky Dhakai paranthas, rolls or kebabs). The Chinese community has added to the menu: you get fish dumplings, pork rolls and stuffed buns, to name just a few. Puris come with different kinds of fillings — of ground and sauteed peas, ground and soaked dal, hing, fish and so on. There is nimki (fried maida strips) and ghugni (cooked white peas) eaten just like that, or with puris.
The concept of an afternoon tea with snacks is serious business, so much so that there is a name for the snacks that are served with tea: you have ‘cha’ with ‘taa’. The region also celebrates the coming together of traditions. Kolkata-based food writer Satarupa Banerjee mentions a fish labangalatika in one of her cookbooks. Labangalatika is a Bengali sweet, a kind of a fried maida parcel held together with a clove. But this dish has a savoury filling, for which she boils and debones fish, and then sautes it with onions, capsicum strips, ginger, green chillies and chilli flakes. To this, she adds soya sauce, sweet chilli sauce, the rind of a fragrant gondhoraj lemon and gondhoraj lemon juice. This is, then, put inside a maida casing, fried and closed with a clove.
Dimer devil is another great innovation. Take a half- boiled egg. Scoop out the yolk, saute with masalas and pepper, put it back in the egg, coat the egg with boiled potatoes, or cooked minced meat or light besan/maida batter, and then crumb fry it. It is quite a balanced meal — with protein, carbs, vitamins, minerals and fat!
I can, indeed, make a meal out of these snacks. These are, to my mind, snacks for all seasons — and for all meals.
- White peas 200 g
- Potato (diced) 1 large
- Onion (minced) 1 large
- Tomato (chopped) 1 large
- Green chillies (slit) 2
- Ginger paste 1 tsp
- Garlic paste 1 tsp
- Turmeric 1 tsp
- Cumin powder ½ tsp
- Coriander powder 1 tsp
- Kashmiri mirch powder 1 tsp
- Garam masala 1 tsp
- Salt To taste
- Sugar To taste
- Mustard oil For frying
— The writer is a Delhi-based food critic
