West Bengal Food & Traditional Cuisine

Bengali food is the most structured of India’s regional cuisines and the one most preoccupied with fish.

A traditional meal is served in courses, not all at once: something bitter first to open the appetite, then leafy greens, then lentils with fried vegetables, then fish, then meat if there is any, then a sour chutney, and sweets last. It is closer in structure to a European meal than anything else in India.

The essential ingredients are mustard — the oil, pungent and raw-tasting, and the ground seed as a sauce — and freshwater fish from the rivers and ponds, above all hilsa and rohu. Panch phoron, a five-spice blend used whole, gives much of the cuisine its signature.

Bengal also has a milk-sweet tradition of its own, built on fresh curdled cheese rather than reduced milk, and it is genuinely the best in the country.

Kolkata adds a Muslim biryani tradition and its own street food.

Ilish bhapa is the dish Bengalis get emotional about: hilsa steamed with mustard paste, green chilli and mustard oil, usually in banana leaf. Hilsa is a migratory fish with an extraordinary flavour and a formidable number of fine bones, and eating it properly is a skill.

Macher jhol, the everyday fish curry with potato and a thin turmeric-and-cumin gravy, eaten with rice.

Kosha mangsho, mutton cooked down slowly until the gravy clings, served with luchi fried bread — the Sunday dish.

Kolkata biryani, which uniquely includes a whole potato, said to date from the exiled nawab of Awadh’s kitchen economising on meat.

Rosogolla and mishti doi: spongy cheese balls in light syrup, and sweetened yoghurt set in earthenware.

Also: shukto, the bitter vegetable opener; chingri malaikari, prawns in coconut; puchka, Kolkata’s fiercer version of the crisp-shell snack; and sandesh in a hundred forms.

Buying fish is a daily ritual and a competitive one. The morning markets — Maniktala, Gariahat, Lake Market — sell river fish still moving, cut to order, and the negotiation over a hilsa in season is a spectacle in itself.

Sweet shops open in the morning and sell out; rosogolla and sandesh are made fresh daily and are bought as gifts whenever visiting anyone. Some Kolkata shops have been trading since the nineteenth century.

The Indian Coffee House on College Street, with its high ceilings, uniformed waiters and decades of student and literary argument, is the physical home of adda.

Street food: kathi rolls, invented in Kolkata, kebab wrapped in a fried paratha; puchka; and telebhaja fritters in the rain.

Eating order matters at a traditional meal; follow your host rather than mixing everything.

West Bengal does not make wine — the climate rules it out — but it has a strong drinking culture of its own.

Darjeeling tea is the state’s great beverage and one of the most valuable agricultural products in India. Grown between about 600 and 2,000 metres on steep slopes, it is picked in distinct flushes: the first flush in March and April, light and floral and the most expensive; the second flush in May and June, with the muscatel character that made the name; and the autumn flush after the rains. It has a protected geographical indication, and a great deal more Darjeeling is sold worldwide than is actually grown. Several estates offer tastings and factory tours.

Toddy and country liquor are drunk in rural districts, and Kolkata has old licensed bars — some, like the ones around Park Street, dating to the colonial period — alongside a rum-drinking tradition.

Cha from a roadside stall in a disposable clay cup, the bhaar, is the daily ritual; the cup is thrown away after and returns to the earth.