From: sbhattac@rnd.GBA.NYU.EDU (Shankar Bhattacharyya)
Newsgroups: rec.food.cooking
Subject: Re: Indian cookbooks/non-meat recipes etc
Date: 19 Dec 92 08:54:27 GMT
Organization: NYU Stern School of Business

In article <1992Dec16.064500.28336@sequent.com> huggett@sequent.com (Terri Huggett) writes:
>In article <BywpqI.8F0@acsu.buffalo.edu> kumard@acsu.buffalo.edu (Deepak Kumar) writes:
>>I just picked up a copy of _The Healthy Cuisine of India_ by
>>Bharati Kirchner (1992) which is, IMHO, an ultimate (and thorough)
>>cookbook on food from Bengal. For people interested in Indian food
>>you may  find this REALLY interesting as none of the run of the
>>mill Indian Restaurants serve Bengali dishes...

Indeed. I agree entirely, but that may also be a problem with acceptance,
since the dishes will not taste like anything that anyone in the US has had
in any restaurant here. That's their loss, but I can see that being a bit
of an issue. Indian restaurant food is merely passable, by the way. And I
have never eaten a dal, at any restaurant in the US, that I would consider
eating at home. Why can't they get a dal right? They gussy dals up. A fancy
dal can be a nice thing, but the basic dals are what we Indians tend to
prefer most of the time. I do, anyway. Give me a simple mussoor dal (that's
the red lentils), some rice, greens, potatoes parboiled and then fried, and
a wedge of lime, and I could be a pretty happy man.

>I'll second this motion.  Haven't used it much yet but it has many
>exciting recipes which are not in the Jaffrey, Sahni, and Devi books.
>I could tell by looking this one is a winner.

I'll third it. Deepak was good enough to refer me to this book when the
subject first came up, and a couple of days ago I picked up a copy. I'm
going to give it to a friend at Christmas, and then I will seriously
consider borrowing it right back. The store only had this one copy, or else
I would have picked one up for myself. Never give anyone a present you
can't use yourself, I say.

My thanks to Deepak. This is a major find. I have other Bengali cookbooks,
in Bengali, and entirely unburdened by quantities. I don't pay a whole lot
of attention to quantities, but it is nice to have some guidelines.

Kirchner still uses a bit more oil than I would like, and she uses mustard
oil somewhat consistently. This is authentic, but there are dietary issues
in consuming large amounts of mustard oil. Further, you can't get
respectable mustard oil in the US. It is not allowed as a food oil, unless
it is significantly diluted, and you cannot get the flavour at all. FDA
does not allow the sale as a food oil of any mustard oil based blend
which has enough of the flavour component, allyl isothiocyanate, to be
interesting.

Given this, my recommendation would be to just use any relatively mild
cooking oil. (As for me, I'm not so constrained; I've come into some pure
allyl isothiocyanate, so I can fake my own mustard oil.)

Kirchner's recipes look very authentic, though I have some gripes. Since I
have not yet cooked anything from it the gripes are certainly premature,
but what the hell.

The recipes are sometimes just a tiny touch more elaborate than absolutely
essential, but not so much so as to get me all excited. Sahni's grace notes
annoy me, and Yamuna Devi's drive me straight up the wall. I like food to
be spare and free of flourishes.

Kirchner uses distinctly more sugar in her non-dessert recipes than I would,
or, more significantly, than my mother would (that's cosmic authority, of
course). This may be regional, indeed it probably is. In Bengali cooking
there is a substantial difference depending on whether one is from east of
the river Padma, from what is now Bangladesh, or from the west side of the
river, from what is now the state of West Bengal in India. We, on the east
side, use much less sugar. Those people over there on the west side use
more. What is even worse, they support the wrong soccer team, and they talk
funny, too. (I expect I will pay for those remarks.)

Kirchner has lived both in the west and in the east, and I have no idea
where she is from in that regard, but my judgment is that she is one of
THEM. The food of West Bengal tends to be, on average, slightly more
elaborate, and, of course, there is the sugar. Other than that, the food is
much the same. (For some bizarre reason they prefer shrimp to shad, but we
can allow them that.) But her transliteration from Bengali looks like it
was done by one of us.

Anyway, when I get around to cooking from this book I expect simply to skip
the sugar. Other than that I am delighted with the book. In addition to
fancier cooking she also has lots of recipes for the everyday dishes that
we Bengalis pine for: shuktos, and chocchodis, and so on and so forth. And
several dishes with poppy seeds - Deepak told me that she had several of
these, so I traipsed right over.

Kirchner also makes some allowances for the non-Indian kitchen, and I have
mixed feelings about this. I suppose one has to do that, but some of these
allowances make me ask, "Say what?" But those are few and far between.

On the other hand, her translation of names for the dishes from Bengali to 
English drives me completely nuts. She takes "Pyaz diye maacher jhol,"
which means a somewhat fluid fish curry with onions, and makes it "Steamed
clams Bengali style." Say what? "Mangsher pullao," which means pulao with
meat, becomes "Imperial rice." What's that again? "Kumror Bhate," or rice
with pumpkin (with some connotative points unaddressed) becomes
"Lime-splashed butternut squash over rice." Lime-splashed? Are we talking
food, or are we talking after-shave? "Chingri maach diyea chholar dal," or
chholar dal with shrimp (chholar dal is a kind of dal or lentil), becomes
"Prawns in a pot of gold." Pot of gold? I shudder to think that there will
be posts on this newsgroup saying, "I would like a recipe for an Indian dish
called 'prawns in a pot of gold'." And none of us Indians will have the
slightest idea what is going on.

I think she should have provided a brief explanation of the names used in
Bengali cooking, such as "chocchodi", "ghonto", "shukto", "jhol", and so
on, and then just used them as is. Hell, anglophones can handle "raclette",
can't they? And we Bengalis have learnt to deal with "roast" and "pudding"
and "bearnaise". Hell, we've learnt to deal with "hot dog", which does not
have a thing to do with dogs. It don't, do it?

Deepak described her recipes as being of "unquestioned authenticity". That
is exactly true. Even her verbal flourishes, choices in transliteration of
Bengali words (reasonable or not), and malapropisms have an almost palpably
Bengali flavour. OK, OK, I concede this: she is not just one of them; she
is one of us.

It's a great book. I may apply tape to cover the damn English translations
of the names of dishes, but it's a great book.

Now, if she only had a recipe for a simple, straight kasondi, which is a
fluid mustard-based sauce we use with greens and rice, and which I haven't
seen in three years ....

- Shankar