Shorshe ilish, perhaps the most popular technique of cooking hilsa, involves simmering and serving cuts of the fish in a mustard sauce so pungent that its wallop reaches right into your sinuses, writes Samanth Subramanian in this excerpt from Following Fish.
In a coastline as long and diverse as India’s, fish inhabit the heart of many worlds—food, of course, but also culture, commerce, sport, history, and society. Journeying along the edge of the peninsula, Samanth Subramanian reports upon a kaleidoscope of extraordinary stories.
In nine essays, Following Fish conducts rich journalistic investigations: among others, of the famed fish treatment for asthmatics in Hyderabad; of the ancient art of building fish boats in Gujarat, of the fiery cuisine and the singular spirit of Kerala’s toddy shops; of the food and the lives of Mumbai’s first peoples; of the history of an old Catholic fishing community in Tamil Nadu; of the hunt for the world’s fastest fish near Goa.
Read this excerpt from a chapter titled ‘On hunting the hilsa and mastering its bones’, on the preparation and the process of eating West Bengal’s prized hilsa.
A day before I arrived in Kolkata, Burrabazar began to burn. Fire ate through fourteen levels of the Nandaram Market complex and its adjoining shops, and late in the evening, I fancied that the smoke still slept in the air. It wasn’t just because of traffic smog that I struggled to read a green-on-white sign mounted on a building, or to spot the little toenail clipping of a moon; I genuinely sensed the acridity of fresh smoke. Later, a friend’s father informed me that what I smelled was the burning of leaves, a popular winter-evening pastime much like dog walking or badminton. (That green-on-white sign, by the way, turned out to announce the premises of the Pollution Control Board.)
Smouldering vegetation notwithstanding, I’d been reliably told that winter is the best time to visit Kolkata. The weather behaves itself and moves into a Goldilocks state—not hot but not too cold, not humid but not too dry. The pace of life slackens even by Kolkata standards, tempers are more even, the traffic seems tolerable, and the puchkas taste better. What winter is not a good time for, they told me, is to eat hilsa, and as this is all that I wanted to do, Kolkata and I appeared to be at odds with each other. At every turn, Bengali classicists—and there are many of them—suggested gently that I return for hilsa in the monsoon. There are no hilsa to be had now, they would state definitively—at least, no hilsa worth the eating. Grit your teeth, make it through the next few months, and come back then. The hilsa, they implied, is simultaneously a fish and a lesson in moral science: Good things come to those who wait.
But Kolkata’s fish barons, far less classicist, have decided that fish are more lucrative than morals. In mid-January, I found hilsa everywhere I looked. Restaurants produced it without a murmur of protest, droves of trucks bore it in from Bangladesh, riverside shack eateries pressed it upon me, and fish markets teemed with it. Good things came to those who had even Rs 60 in their wallets. Which was how, less than three hours after I first coughed on leaf smoke, I was sitting with a plate of rice and a shallow dish of shorshe ilish in front of me.
If Bengali cuisine were Wimbledon, the hilsa would always play on Centre Court. It is the undisputed champion of fish in this corner of India, possessed of enigmatic qualities of taste and all the more desired because of its vaunted seasonal elusiveness. Poets have written on it, one calling the ilish, as the hilsa is known in Bengali, ‘the darling of the waters.’ The hilsa can be a symbol of Bengali identity but also of the sibling rivalry between East and West Bengal. It participates in another rivalry as well: A hilsa dinner is a tradition for fans of the East Bengal football team when it wins, just as prawns are for fans of Mohun Bagan. At every fish bazaar, in a pleasing spot of meta-fishing, the promise of fresh hilsa is bait for customers, shouted out to reel business in.
If Bengali cuisine were Wimbledon, the hilsa would always play on Centre Court.
For many years, my immediate mental reference point to the phrase ‘fish market’ has been the admonition of the teachers at my school in Chennai, many of whom had clearly never been to such a market. During particularly raucous afternoons, the teacher would sally forth, in rhetorical spirit: ‘Where do you think you are? A fish market?’ I remember I would pause at the time, suspending my hijinks sometimes for a whole second, to quickly imagine a deafening charnel house where one waded through rivers of blood and offal, battled piercing odours, and purchased fish from beetle-browed, thuggish merchants of death.
The Lake Market fish stalls rose far above those infernal expectations. In one long space papered over with wall prints of Shiva and Kali, appropriate deities of destruction, the vendors sat behind their fish on concrete platforms. Cutters jutted out from under their knees, their dark blades rising like the trunks of trumpeting elephants. Melting ice and blood dripped in taut rivulets into the gutters that lined the aisles. At the corner of each platform, fish innards stacked up in neat pyramids. The fish was so fresh there was barely any odour; the solitary line of chicken vendors at the far wall was entirely responsible for the atmosphere’s redolence. Most notably, though, business was conducted at a very civilized volume; my teachers, I think, would have been suitably astonished.
Khokon, my gaunt and bescarved guide, was the first to assure me that there was now good hilsa to be had even in the off-season in Kolkata, and he marched me towards a vendor to prove it. The traditional start of the hilsa season, Saraswathi Pooja, was still over a month away. That is when the fish, sea-dwellers for the rest of the year, begin to move house in large numbers,
swimming upriver to spawn. But there are hilsa to be found in the rivers in winter as well; one theory has it, in fact, that ecosavvy Bengalis of earlier centuries constructed the idea of the hilsa ‘season’ and buckled it to the religious calendar only to avoid overfishing.
In my hands, the proffered hilsa felt firm, dense and oily. Its fine silver scales were not immediately obvious to the touch, but they still glinted, under the low overhead lamps, like a tray of precious gems. All the hilsa in the market that day, each between eight hundred grams and one and a half kilogrammes, were from Bangladesh, and they wouldn’t have been there even ten days earlier. The Bangladesh government, in response to high domestic demand, had imposed a six-month ban on exports to India, and the ban had run its course a week before I reached Kolkata, when fish shipments resumed across the Benapole–Petrapole border.
As united as they are in appreciation of the hilsa, Bengalis are divided by geography over the relative merits of hilsa from the Padma and Ganga rivers. Bangladeshis prize the plumper fish from the Padma above everything else; the Ganga hilsa, they will concede magnanimously, is still hilsa, but that is really all that can be said for it. West Bengalis, on the other hand, look with sympathy upon their oriental cousins, who cannot appreciate the intense flavours of the Ganga hilsa; their collective opinion is that the Bangladeshis are more to be pitied than scorned for their congenital error in judgement.
As united as they are in appreciation of the hilsa, Bengalis are divided by geography over the relative merits of hilsa from the Padma and Ganga rivers.
At the Lake Market bazaar, the fish vendors claimed that they could tell Ganga hilsa from Padma hilsa simply by touch. How? ‘The Indian fish looks more silvery,’ one sage began, but then suddenly, like a stricken Freemason on the verge of divulging the secret handshake, he gave up, and hinted instead at a mystic art. ‘It’s in the touch, you won’t understand it,’ he said elliptically.
‘Just as you can’t tell if somebody is a good person or a bad person by just looking at their face. You need to know fish; you need to have that experience.’
His younger, non-Templar neighbour had fewer qualms. ‘The Padma fish are oilier, and I have a theory for that. There is more silt in the Ganga, so the fish are leaner, since they fight against the silt and the current to swim upstream.’ The Padma fish, happily deprived of this workout, thus turned out plumper and rounder. ‘And then there is also a pronounced pink streak on the underbelly of the Bangladeshi fish,’ he added, helpfully pointing it out to me by tracing a smear of pinkness with a chipped fingernail.
I began to move on, but my vendor seemed at a loose end, eager to chat. ‘How come it isn’t busier than it is right now?’ I asked. It was already 10 a.m., but there were still baskets of shrimp and crab, pre-filleted hilsa, and monster-sized catla spread out on banana leaves, awaiting buyers. ‘It’s a Monday,’ he said. ‘Very few people buy fish on a Monday.’
This puzzled me. It wasn’t a religious stricture, as far as I could tell, and nobody seemed to know any other reason for fishless Mondays. Weeks later, though, I lit upon one possible solution. In Kitchen Confidential, the New York chef Anthony Bourdain advises his readers never to order fish in a restaurant on Monday. At the beginning of the week, a restaurant chef is still trying to move out the fish left over from the weekend. ‘He anticipates the likelihood that he might still have some fish lying around on Monday morning—and he’d like to get money for it without poisoning his customers,’ Bourdain explains. ‘If it still smells okay on Monday night—you’re eating it.’ Forewarned, especially in the case of dodgy fish, is forearmed.
Shorshe ilish, perhaps the most popular technique of cooking hilsa, involves simmering and serving cuts of the fish in a mustard sauce so pungent that its wallop reaches right into your sinuses. The sauce is a marvellous assembly of grainy mustard, curd, chillies, turmeric and lemon, achieving the sort of bright yellow that is otherwise only found in pots of poster paint. But its very power always leaves room for regret that it might be masking the natural creamy taste of the fish.
The first time I ate shorshe ilish, however, I thought no such thing; I was too focussed on making sure that the bones didn’t kill me. The hilsa has a viciously designed skeleton, evolution’s way of convincing predators that they should look elsewhere for lunch. Like an overbuilt house, its superstructure has big support bones, feathery little bones called thorns that tickle as they slide accidentally down your throat, and a host of other innocuous bones that seem to serve no purpose but that can probably puncture your digestive system once swallowed. ‘The Bengalis have a standing joke,’ Sharad Dewan, the executive chef at the Park hotel in Kolkata, told me. ‘A true Bengali can take a mouthful of hilsa, and sort meat from bone in his mouth, swallowing the meat and storing the bones to one side, to be extricated later. If you can’t do that, you’re not a real Bengali.’
Dewan is a New Delhi man himself, and he first ate hilsa at the house of a friend in that city’s Bengali enclave of Chittaranjan Park. ‘I remember how they would cook the entire fish. Not one part was wasted,’ said Dewan. ‘The evening would start with fried hilsa, and then there would be a curry with mustard, and then little cutlets of hilsa roe. If I ever spent the night there, I’d wake up the next morning to see breakfast that used up the fish’s head—either in a soupy stock called jhol or mashed up into a chutney.’ The chutney, called ambol ilish, involves deep-frying the head, breaking it up into little pieces, and marinating them in raw tamarind, sugar, lemon juice and the Bengali five-spice mixture known as panch phoran.
If you can wangle your way into it—I couldn’t—the best place in Kolkata to eat hilsa, by popular opinion, is the exclusive Bengal Club. But Dewan’s kitchen at the Park is not far behind. My hilsa education got suddenly intensive under one of his lieutenants, Vasanthi, whose relaxed, toothy grin completely belied her swift hands, her alert eyes, and her martinet manner with a gangling assistant.
‘First, we learn to cut.’ Cutting into a hilsa feels very much like cutting into a very firm, fresh tomato. First a swipe near the neck, then near the tail, and then longitudinal cuts along the sides to peel away the fillet from that side of the fish. This particular hilsa had gorgeous, pink, slightly marbled flesh. ‘Each fillet has a little black area at the bottom, lining the belly of the fish,’ said Vasanthi. ‘Cut that off. It tastes of nothing.’ With another fish, we lopped off the head and, through the digestive orifice, scooped out a mass of congealed blood and hilsa innards. Then we cut the fish into thick slices—what Vasanthi called ‘curry cuts’—to fry. ‘In Bengal, we keep the fins on, we don’t cut them off,’ said Vasanthi. ‘And look here, this is the roe. You can prise it out and fry it up with mustard, onions and green chillies.’ Around the liver sat ruddy flaps of fat, signs of a hilsa that had led a contented life. ‘That liver would be great to fry.’
First a swipe near the neck, then near the tail, and then longitudinal cuts along the sides to peel away the fillet from that side of the fish.
Somebody, somewhere, must have thrown a switch at this point, because Vasanthi’s actions moved up two gears, and as she whipped between ingredients, my notes began to get scratchier and scratchier. For a baked dish of mint hilsa, she salted one fillet, mixed some mint chutney with what must have been curd (although my scribbles say ‘crud’), mustard oil and desiccated coconut, and marinated the fish in the mixture for ten minutes. She popped the covered plate into a microwave set for eight minutes, power-napped for three seconds, and then turned to the shorshe ilish.
Even on warp speed, Vasanthi made the best shorshe ilish I ate in all my days in Kolkata, days that were so full of shorshe ilish that they now seem to meld together in memory into one bright yellow, mustardy, sinus-rattling streak. ‘To make the mustard paste ahead of time, you soak black and yellow mustard in water, with chillies, for half an hour, and you grind that into a paste. Not too fine, just grainy,’ she said. To that paste, she added curd, turmeric, salt and lemon. ‘Add that immediately after grinding,’ she warned sternly, somehow sensing that I was exactly the sort of person to dally with a curd-lemon-turmeric mixture in my hand. ‘Delay it even by a few seconds, and the paste turns bitter.’
In a wok, she heated mustard oil and then added, in succession, the mustard paste, water, slices of halved green chillies, salt, quartered tomatoes, and finally, two curry cuts of the hilsa. While the shorshe ilish slowly simmered its way to completion, Vasanthi rolled two other cuts of the fish in the mustard paste and allowed them to marinate. When they were ready, she wrapped them in banana leaves and let them steam in a colander for twenty minutes, like two fat gentlemen, draped in Turkish towels, sweating in a sauna. ‘This is ilish paturi, a very popular, very classical dish,’ she said. The fish were barely in the colander, and she was already tracing patterns on the cuttingboard with her knife, itching to move on.
Where Vasanthi really came into her own was in deboning hilsa fillets, a practice that has become popular only in the recent past, to tempt inept non-Bengalis who cannot sieve bones in their mouths. Laying the steamed, softened, mint-crusted fillet flat, she cut it into four long quarters. Then, pressing down hard with her knife, she moved an entire quarter of meat off its skeleton.
This is a tricky maneuver; you can take away too little flesh and leave much of the hilsa still sitting on its bones, or you can scrape too hard and take dozens of little thorn-bones out with the flesh. Vasanthi wielded her knife with the delicacy of an archaeologist dusting skeletal remains, careful to leave behind nothing but bone.
The final act was also the most straightforward. Firing up another burner with a loud ‘whooooomph,’ Vasanthi set on it a non-stick pan laced liberally with mustard oil. Into that went two cuts of hilsa, dusted with just salt and turmeric, to be fried until a golden-brown sheath crept across the surface of the fish.
The fish she spooned out, and the oil she set aside. The hilsa is a naturally fatty fish, and in a wok, the heat forces its oils out, to mix with the mustard oil. The hilsa-enhanced mustard oil is worth saving, to flavour food or even to mix simply with rice, as many Bengalis do.
Vasanthi’s plump hilsa, on the day, were from Bangladesh, and what they seemed to lack in sharp natural flavour, they made up for in texture. The paturi, unwrapped like a Christmas gift, flaked away in soft layers, its creamy flesh touched with the mustard and tempered by the damp, green taste of the banana leaf. The fried cuts of hilsa, under their crisp swagger, were softies at heart, fresh and warm. I may have done the shorshe ilish some injustice, though. Entranced by its grainy, wicked gravy, I neglected to take any more than passing bites of the fish, although its oils—essence de hilsa—had swept like a marauding army through the gravy anyway.
My vigilance lulled by a gourmandizing stupor, I could thus turn to the deboned mint hilsa, knowing that even the most careless of bites wouldn’t result in bleeding gums or a lacerated tongue. But after many days of eating hilsa for breakfast, lunch and dinner, my bone-seeking sense seemed to remain automatically alert, and that turned out to be a blessing. In one—and only one—mouthful of hilsa, I bit down gently and landed upon a mass of thorns in the middle of the flesh, emerging from the fish in deadly little tendrils.
I suspended chewing and pondered the situation. Then I began to work at the mouthful of fish with my tongue, holding the bones steady against my teeth or the roof of my mouth and coaxing hilsa off them in patient little moves. To an observer, I must have resembled a cow meditatively considering its cud. I was left, at the end of my exertions, with just a jumbled clutch of bones, which I neatly deposited to one side of my plate. I ate the rest of my mint hilsa in a glow of satisfaction. It was one of the proudest moments of my life.
This is an excerpt from Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast published in 2010 (Penguin Books). Excerpted with permission from the author and Penguin Random House India.
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