Skip to main content
Image: exclusive property of Jack Daniel’s.


Mutton and
whiskey make for a successful Bengali party

Apartments in Mumbai tend to be pretty small and the
first two places that we lived in here after we had got married were pretty tiny.
My wife and I of us could barely fit in to the house, let alone call guests over.

Once I began food blogging, I made a new set of friends,
fellow bloggers, blog
readers, food lovers. They would sometimes call us home
for dinner. I’d want to call them over too, but our apartment was too small for
that.

Then we finally managed to rent a two bedroom apartment
in Bandra which had a comparatively largish hall. This is just what I was
waiting for, and within a month of moving in, we called our first guests. A
group of fellow Bengalis in Mumbai whom I had got to know thanks to my blog.

I decided to cook for them myself and kept the menu simple. I
was going to make kosha mangsho, a slow cooked Bengali goat meat dish, which I
cook in a pressure cooker to save time. This is the one of the most popular
Bengali celebratory dishes.

Next question was what to serve as drinks. I sent out
SMS’s (Whatsapp didn’t exist then), the night before the party, asking my
friends what their liquor preferences were.
I don’t know why I even bothered asking, the answer from
everyone was ‘whiskey’.
We Bengalis love our whiskey you see.

Image: exclusive property of Jack Daniel’s.


A couple of weeks before the party, we had gone to the
house of another friend and he had served JD, which we had enjoyed. So I called
our local liquor shop at Bandra in Mumbai and they told me that they did stock
Jack Daniels and that they would deliver it home too.

Next day, the guests arrived at lunch-time and I served
them the JD with some
kebabs from a local shop on the side, while the pressure
cooker whistled as my
kosha mangsho cooked.

I was nervous, as this was the first party that we had
ever thrown. Plus was the first time
that I was cooking for someone
other than my wife and my family. Plus, I was
cooking a Bengali classic dish for
a Bengali audience and we Bengalis can be very
picky about our food.

Well the kosha mangsho turned out to be a success thankfully
and the dish was wiped clean and I breathed a sigh of relief. To this day I am
not sure whether it was my cooking alone that wowed our guests, or whether ‘Jack’
had a role in it, but our guests that day I have shared many meals together
since then.

Disclaimer: This
is a sponsored article by Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey.

Jack
Daniel’s promotes Responsible Drinking.

The images used above are exclusive property of Jack
Daniel’s.

Leave a Reply