Skip to main content
Around IndiaMeals

Calcutta’s very own stew.

By March 17, 2022July 12th, 2024No Comments

 

We were in the second of college when one day my friend, Bunty, told me about a very cheap place to have a filling meal. It opened at 4 he said. The two of us set out from the hallowed gates of Presidency College (not a deemed university in ‘93, though 175 years old by then), turned right, walked past down the crowded pavement which was lined by stalls selling second hand books. 

We made our way in between buses, hand pulled

rickshaws, trucks, trams, trucks and the proverbial teeming multitudes, as crossed the road and stood in front of College Square. Inside which was a public swimming pool. We would occasionally cut across the complex, the venue for one of the most iconic Durga Pujas in autumn with the pandal built on the pool (!) , in the evenings in case we were taking a connecting bus from Bowbazar homr or a local from Sealdah to Jadobpur. The breeze from the pool, in which folks would be playing water polo, was so refreshing.

There was a cabin like room at the border of the pool. It had a small window with people queued up in front of it. I looked at Bunty quizzically. ‘YMCA canteen,’ he replied with his characteristic impish smile. ‘You get stew here. Veg for Rs 3.50. Chicken. Rs 5 . Plus two slices of bread and butter.’ (Don’t hold me to the prices. I could be a Rupee off.)

The Calcutta ‘stew,’ made at home by my mum, and often still at our house in Mumbai, when we are under the weather, foxes folks like my wife who are not from the city. It’s a clear soup/ broth with vegetables and chicken boiled in it. Delicious, my wife will tell you, but not a ‘stew’. So says a Parsi. A member of a community which calls a sweetish dried root vegetable and raisin dish, ‘ishtew.’ Humph!

The soup served to us that afternoon at College Square, veg as it was cheaper, on a white chipped China bowl, balanced on a saucer, was piping hot. It had a potato, unripe papaya, French beans and carrots. With a liberal lacing of coarsely crushed black pepper. Paired with two soft, thick slices of ‘pound ruti,’ chubby loaves made in local bakeries, slathered in butter. It made for a life redefining treat. I went back for the stew through my years at College Street while I finished my graduation and then MBA. Occasionally indulging in the ‘chicken’ one. A piece of liver added in and some meat on a bone. 

I went back to College Street twenty five years later to revisit my old college food haunts with my friend, Debjani, whose birthday it happens to be today. Bunty’s ‘YMCA canteen’ was there, but shut that evening as it was a signboard. I noticed a signboard which said Bowbajar Byam Somiti in Bengali. Bowabazar gym. Nah, it wasn’t the YMCA! It made sense. I had read about how the stew is a fixture at tents of the sports club that dot the Kolkata Maidan. This came from the same culture.

If you go by Kolkata food Instagram of recent years, THE place to have stew is at Chitta Babu’s dokan (stall) at Dacres Lane. A tiny food street at the heart of Kolkata’s office para. CBD of yore. I’d never been there earlier. It’s clientele, till influencers discovered it, were office folks, kakus (uncles). I went there a few years back. The stew was nice. The location abominable. For someone who has done a fair bit of street food hunting, it was possibly one of the the filthiest stretch I’d ever come across and one I’d never recommend to people. The fact that it lies bang in the middle of the city makes this worse. 

If you want your taste of the Calcutta Stew, go to College Square or the Maidan is what I’d suggest. Stand at the counter and say, ‘dada ekta stew deben?’ If it’s a lady at the counter, didi would be more apt.

Leave a Reply