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The ilish or hilsa curry that I recently made in Mumbai using my granny’s recipe Has to be paired with steamed rice |
post is about an ilish maachher jhol recipe that I picked up my from my maternal grandmother
during my recent trip to Kolkata and which I am going to share with you here. It is
a light fish curry made with the much loved hilsa fish. While we refer to this curry
as ‘jhol’ in our family, I have seen some Bengalis on social media refer to it as as ‘tel jhol’ too. Unlike in most curries from the western coast of India, this curry from undivided Bengal is not coconut based.
no name’, reference in the heading, this post also looks at the curious case of
my grandmother’s ‘birthday’ which was celebrated a couple of days back.
birthday parties
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Happy 90th to didu |
around birthday you ask? Well, birth certificates were apparently not the norm
in Bengal at the time when my granny was born I am told and birth dates were rarely
recorded back then. I am talking of the 1920s. A birth date was often arbitrarily
decided by the school teacher when a child went to school or, in my granny’s
case, by her husband for post marriage red tape requirements.
back, my bother and my first cousin, who were then kids still living in
Kolkata, decided that didu (as we call my grandmother) should have a ‘proper’
birthday. They chose a date in March, bought her gifts with their very meagre
pocket money then and celebrated didu’s ‘first birthday’ when she was close to
80. The two cousins have grown up since then and have both moved out of
Kolkata. Both have recently given didu a great granddaughter each as a gift and have made
her very happy.
my aunt who lives in Dubai, was in Kolkata in March and helped didu celebrate her
grandchildren given birthday.
a couple of days back was the one which my late grandfather had given her. He had done so for didu’s bank and pension paper requirements.
advanced her age by a few months when he assigned a birthday to her and made her ‘older’ than what she was. “He could
have reduced my age, but no that he wouldn’t do that,”said didu with a huff. According to the official records, didu turned 90 a couple of days back. She would argue
that she has a few more months till she hits 90 but that but then which woman is ever happy to disclose her age?
their birthdays,'” explained didu to me. “At the
most they would remember it through life events such as so and so was born
during the month of the floods.”
didu. I could hear a bashful giggle in her voice through the phone lines when
she referred to her marriage. “In those days it was enough that we
had got married. We didn’t celebrate anniversaries and all like you people.”
declared birthday’ and then sent us pictures of the same. Mom went to the
local Spencer’s store and bought sweets and a date and walnut cake and then
shingaras from the local sweet shop for the ‘party.’ The other guests were the house help. My aunt and her husband who live in Kolkata couldn’t make it because of the rains that day.
sounded very excited on the phone and said that no-one had ever cut a cake on
her birthday before this.
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Cutting her first birthday cake |
minimalism in Bengali cooking from my grandma’s kitchen
go back to my lunch with didu from a few weeks when I had gone to visit her in
Kolkata. She cooked a gala lunch for me for me the day before I left. We had a nice
chat over lunch that afternoon while I gobbled up the delicious food that she
had dished out.
I’ve seen young girls cook ilish (hilsa) with onion and garlic in cookery shows
on TV. That’s strange,” said
my granny. She was referring to the cookery shows that she watches on Bengali
TV channels
should just add minimal spices to ilish so that the flavour of
the fish is not masked. Not onion or garlic or lot of spices,” explained didu. “There was a lot of
ilish around where I grew up in Dhaka. They would do shorshe bhaapa (steamed in
mustard) ilish in our house only if the fish was not fresh,” said
didu in full Marco Pierre White ‘respect your ingredients’ mode.
Less is more is not just a western culinary concept. It is revered in Bengal too.
across hilsa cooked with onions myself was when I went to Dhaka in the late 1990s
for a market research project. I was flummoxed by it too! I had never eaten
hilsa cooked in onions till that day and never after that either. When I
mentioned this on Instagram, a Hindu lady from Bangladesh wrote in saying that
cooking ilish in onion was not that uncommon for them. I specified the ‘Hindu’
bit as I had at one time wondered whether the addition of onion was a Mughal
influenced Muslim custom. I would love to know more about that so do write in
if you have some information on this and I would to add it to the post.
house to house. Many don’t shallow fry the fish for example before putting it
into curry unlike what is done for fish like rohu or kaatla in Bengali houses.
The tradition of not frying the ilish first seems to stem from a time in
Bangladesh when the lilish available was very fresh and needed just the lightest touch in the kitchen to make them ready for meal.
adding it to curries.
recipe for the curry while we had lunch. She told me in the ‘bold brush
strokes’ manner that people in her generation use.
that my mother would make us when we were kids was similar to to the one didu
makes. The other ilish curry that my mother would make was a watery crushed
mustard seed gravy. We didn’t have a variety of ilish dishes made at our
place.
they would do a shorshe bhaapa (mustard steamed) ilish only when the fish was
not at its freshest. The mustard helped mask this. Ironically, shorshe bhaapa was one of the first ilish
dishes that I made in my kitchen and felt excited then about going beyond what
I then considered the ‘boring’ menu at home. The maturity of age has taught me
that there was a lot of thought and history behind what happened in
our kitchen.
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Subtlety is key to this curry |
earlier, my mother in in Kolkata with my granny right now. She is back to her
pet project of talking to didu about her (didu’s) childhood and then
documenting these on her (my mother’s) blog. This precious narrative of my
family’s oral history is also a fascinating read about life in period around 1930 – 1945 s
in Dhaka in undivided Bengal and in what is now Bangladesh. I have posted a few of the links at the end of the post.
when I read my mother’s blog post about the hilsa bounty during my granny’s
childhood days in Dhaka. Ilish today is so expensive. A slightly biggish one
(850 g) was Rs 1200 a kilo in our Bansdroni market in Kolkata. Folks like my
granny and my mother can’t think of buying ilish at these prices. I bought an
ilish for my granny when I was in Kolkata. Didu scolded me for spending so much
and then proceeded to cook the ilish for me!
peti stomach pieces, which has fewer bones, and kept the bonier gaada pieces
for herself as she knows that I can’t handle fish bones well. That’s what
#GrannyLove is all about.
recreate didu’s ilisher tel jhol after I returned to Mumbai and bought
ilish at the Khar fish market. Didu adds brinjal to the curry and so did I.
Some people on Facebook, whose families originate from erstwhile East Bengal, said that they make a similar curry but add pumpkin to
it. Interestingly, no-one said that they add potatoes to the curry which was
strange given that Bengalis, including didu, add potatoes to everything.
level of course.
Over the years I have realised that it is not just the Bengalis who live ilish. In Mumbai, Parsis eat ilish too. My late father in law was a fan of ilish I am told. They get a seawater of hilsa variety from Gujarat here and the Parsis call it bheeng. My father in law loved the ilish roe or garab too. Unlike in my mom’s kitchen, where the ilish roe is kept in the fish when cooked, Parsis take out the roe and cook it separately. Zinobia Schroff makes and retails a delightful hilsa or bheeng roe pickle which is called garab nu achar. My mother told me that Bengalis take the roe out and cook it only if it is too much in quantity and added that she is not a fan of this.
Chef Vicky Ratnani tells me that the Sindhi community, to which he belongs reveres the hilsa too. They call it pallo and it is apparently considered to be the vehicle of their main God, Jhulelal, just as the lion is for the Goddess Durga in the east.
I am very keen to try out how the Sindhis and Parsis prepare hilsa.
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Parsi ladies in Mumbai from didu’s generation who knew their birth dates |
interpretation of Didu’s ilisher jhol recipe
or 5 pieces, 4 slices of fish, 1 tablespoon mustard oil, 1 teaspoon turmeric
powder, 1/2 teaspoon each red chilli powder and salt, 1 teaspoon nigella seeds,
3 green chillies, 1.25 cups of water
step pictorial depiction of the recipe.
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Fry brinjal |
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Then lightly fry the hilsa in the same pan |
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30 seconds on each side |
mustard oil in a pan. Add kalo jeere (nigella seeds) and green chillies. You
can use the same pan in which the fish was fried so the oil used in frying the
fish is not wasted. This will add to the final flavour of the dish.
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Fry the phoron or base spices. No panch phoron is required |
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Add water |
slide in the fish ( 4 pieces) in the boiling water. Make sure that they don’t
break. Reduce the flame after 30 seconds, gently turn the fish over. Add
the brinjal. Once shallow fried, the brinjal cooks pretty fast in water so it
makes sense to add it later. Let it cook for a minute or so and you are done.
You don’t want to overcook the fish.
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Add the ilish and then the brinjal |
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Gently turn the fish over and do not cook it for more than 4,5 minutes |
blog post of mine on didu’s birthdays
blog post on Didu’s life in pre-partition Dacca (Dhaka) which makes a
reference to ilish machh