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| Baby Loaf came and sniffed the plate as I took pictures and then walked off |
Let me tell you why I call what you see in the picture as my Bengali adulting thali.
My first exposure to Bengali food, apart from during my annaprashan in Canterbury, was when we moved to Calcutta in 1980. I was 6 then and as fussy about my food as our elder cat Baby Loaf is now. Like him, I too would turn my nose away from the food put in front of me. The food served to everyone else. My mother would then make special dishes for me. Just as I take special care in feeding Loaf. I even picked our younger cat, little Nimki, once and took him away while Loaf ate. ‘Don’t you know how sensitive your brother is,’ I thundered. Nimki thankfully eats without a fuss. Touchwood.
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| We love you too Nimki |
I refused to have bhaat, plain steamed rice, back then. Ma would make Chinese fried rice for me instead, the polo of Iran with tahdig or the chello kebab (with butter added to the rice) that I learnt to love during our time at Rasht.
It was only when I was in my late 20s that I began to enjoy steamed rice with my meals. This was after I left home, moved to Mumbai and missed the food I had grown up on.
Well, some of it!
I refused to eat dal as a kid. When I was 14, dadu (my grandfather) and my chhotomashi (youngest maternal aunt) came over to our house one afternoon when my mom had gone to work. It turned out to be a ‘dal intervention.’ They gently told me to not fuss about eating dal. This would make life a lot easier for my mum who by then was raising my younger brother and me, after my dad had passed on, and used to travel to far off Howrah everyday to teach at a college. I listened to them.
I was never too fond of vegetables. While I’d eat some under protest, some such as lau (bottle gourd), I would refuse to touch.
4 years back, as I entered my mid 40s was when I shifted to a more age appropriate way of eating. I called this #LittleJackHornerMeals as I began to eat even vegetables like lau. What a good boy am I, I asked the Internet world as I grammed pictures of my lunch plates.
I was not too fond of the fish cooked at home while growing up. Barring the maachh bhaaja or fish fry. Only rohu, ilish or pamphlet (pomfret) at that. Not fried in mustard oil though. Shaada tel (vegetable oi) worked. My first encounter with mustard oil was after we moved into Calcutta and I found the aroma nauseating. It’s been a fixture in our kitchen in Mumbai for the past 4 years as both K and I have taken to it. They now tell us that the cold pressed oils that our grandparents swore by, looked down upon in the 90s thanks to the machinations of the refined oil lobby, are actually good for us! As is ghee! Jaah baba!
This story wrote itself as I sat down to our lunch of lau’er ghonto, bhaaja moong dal, bhaat and maachh bhaaja. The katla was fresh, ordered in from Poonam at Khar market. The moong dal, Radha Tilak rice, turmeric, cumin and coriander powders, and the mustard oil were all shipped by the Bengal Store and sent to us by Pritha Sen whom I affectionately call pishi. This is what she told me about them: ‘Glad you liked the artisanal products. Let’s help the collectives get a grip back on their livelihoods, something the www.thebengalstore.com has been helping do by creating a well packaged and marketing network for their produce. If any of you interested in the food products, check out http://www.thebengalstore.com//food’
Ps: While Instagram has made me fall in love with thalis and I’d taken out the stainless steel plates that we had got early on in our wedding for lunch today, as a kid I refused to eat on stainless steel utensils. I found them to be ‘smelly.’ Gosh, was I that fussy? Or was this a function of the ash used to wash our dishes back then.
PPS: It was only after I was ten that I began to use my fingers for eating. Till then it was a knife and fork. I had my own set.
Moral of the story, all I want to say if you have a pampered and spoilt child is, ‘there’s hope.’ Look at my thala today.
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| Kobji dubiye |
