The Eden Test starts next week and as schools and colleges get into holiday mode before Christmas, it's time for another festive winter in Kolkata. Which means it's also time to celebrate with the delicacies of this season. Whether it is the natun gurer chocolate souffle at Balaram Mallick or the fresh cakes at Flurys or Cookie Jar, eating out in Kolkata turns into an absolute delight at this time.
First things first, the Kolkata chocolate pastries have little parallel elsewhere in the world. And here I state from the experience of having tried out pastries in the US, UK, continental Europe, Australia, Canada and another 25 or so countries. In fact, even the Sacher Torte — a kind of chocolate cake — one of Vienna's leading exports, would fall flat in comparison to the freshly baked pastries in our city. The apple strudel, almost a tourist attraction in Vienna's Schonbrunn Palace, stands to face stiff competition from the Kolkata variant.
What Belgium is to chocolates and Switzerland is to cheese, Kolkata can surely be for natun gurer mishti. If the Sacher Torte can be exported, kara paker natun gurer mishti can also stand up to the challenge. And why just sweets? This is also the time to try out freshly made phulkopir singara, kachori and other kinds of telebhaja in the morning when going to the bazaar.
Having two kachoris and a singara on the way to the bazaar is a typical suburban Kolkata ritual. Every narrow bylane in north Kolkata has a street-side telebhajar dokan with a loyal band of customers. Winter inevitably brings the natun aloor tarkari to go with the kachori and it is a challenge to stop at two kachoris during these months. Readers who are fans of the Bengali sleuth Byomkesh Bakshi will know what having a phulkopir singara with muri can do to liven up an off-colour day.
If it's singara in the morning, it has to be the jhalmuri in the afternoon. It is the world's best afternoon snack; filling, simple to make, extremely tasty and perfect for a large group. Every school, college, sports club and local club in Kolkata will have a jhalmuriwala outside the gates every afternoon. So much so that winter in the Maidan is incomplete without jhalmuri.
If you are a real foodie, you should undertake a decadent mishti-tasting expedition along GT Road. It should rank as one of the 'to-do drives' in winter, a journey that inevitably links to the local history, memory and uniqueness of places like Chandernagore, Pandua, Burdwan or Shaktigarh. The sitabhog and mihidana from Burdwan or the lyangcha from Shaktigarh are delicacies that we'd do well to market to the world as Bengali exports, a point I have emphasized in my book, Cooking on the Run: An Average Indian Man's Encounter's with food.
As a sports analyst, what I find fascinating is that particular food items at particular sports venues are now almost a part of ritual. Be it strawberries and cream at Wimbledon or champagne at the Coroner's Garden at Lords during the lunch break of a Test match, these are traditions that add to the drama and aura of sports watching. In June this year I was intrigued to see leading players pour a generous helping of cream over the strawberries at the Wimbledon players' cafe a couple of hours before stepping on to court!
Kolkata too is part of this global sports-food network. A media lunch at Eden Gardens is incomplete without the fried fish and the mutton, which the CAB sets out for the working journalists. Even the biscuits and tea in the minuscule plastic cups served in the media box helps re-ignite memories of past encounters and contribute to the nostalgia of Eden.
(Boria Majumdar's book Cooking on the Run: An Average Indian Man's Encounters with Food will be launched on December 2.)
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