In Bengal’s kitchens, curdled milk becomes sandesh; vegetable peels become khosha bhaja and bata; and fish is relished from scale to tail.
Growing up, I recall watching the sunlight bouncing off the scalloped edges of the aluminium plate reserved for panta bhaat. The magic of fermentation and the secret ingredient of time would transform day-old rice, resurrected with water, into the perfect summer dish. I could identify panta bhaat by the scent its preparation left in the kitchen: a sour-sweet funk, signalling the breakdown of starch into a cooling, probiotic-rich preparation, served best with burnt red chillies and a generous glug of mustard oil. Breathing new life into yesterday’s leftovers or an almost-rotten vegetable was commonplace for the average Bengali long before the adoption of zero-waste became mainstream specially through popular media.
Dr Amrita Bhattacharya, food anthropologist, chef, and co-founder of the home-kitchen project Handpicked by Amrita in Shantiniketan, West Bengal, echoes this idea. She says, “Today, we celebrate these dishes for their complex flavours, but we must remember they were born from a time when [cooking with] waste wasn’t just a lifestyle choice. [Throwing away waste] was a risk our ancestors couldn’t afford.” In Amrita’s home, much like in the homes of many Bengalis, peels, stalks, and produce past their prime often find a second life before being written off as waste. She has vivid memories of curdled milk being boiled with sugar to create sandesh, a Bengali sweet. “That was the philosophy—nothing was ever truly discarded, only transformed,” she reflects.
Plating Up Scarcity and Survival
Bengali cuisine comprises food practices of a vast ethno-linguistic region in the eastern part of the Indian subcontinent spanning West Bengal and Bangladesh, which were part of the unified Bengal Presidency up until the Partition of India in 1947. It is characterised by a resilient, zero-waste culinary philosophy forged by culture, geography, and historical trauma.
Bengali cuisine’s inherent resourcefulness stemmed from necessity. Cultural chronicler and the mind behind Kolkata’s heritage mishti trail—a food walk focussed on the history and evolution of Kolkata’s sweets—Sibendu Das chalks up much of Bengal’s preoccupation with zero-waste cooking to a “lack of access”.
Natural and man-made disasters like floods and famines, as well as everyday limitations like the infrequency of markets, especially in rural areas, meant less availability of ingredients. Transnational migration has had a similar effect on the everyday food realities of people in the region. “[You] come from one geographical region, you [have] access to certain raw materials, for example, a local fish, fruit or herb. And then, you migrate to another part of the land … you are no longer getting the same ingredients,” Sibendu elaborates.
Nowhere is the impact of migration on taste more evident than in the legacy of undivided Bengal. The 1947 Partition cleaved a unified region into West Bengal and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), triggering a massive influx of people across the new borders. During this upheaval, ancestral recipes became anchors and the kitchen emerged as a site of cultural preservation.
This is poignantly illustrated in Moumita Mukherjee’s recipe for ghaittya. The home chef inherited it from her in-laws, who hail from Bangladesh. A zingy, spicy mishmash of deep-fried fish, ghaittya is mostly made to revitalise surplus fish past its peak. Both ghaittya and jhuro—a similar preparation made with mutton or other meats—reflect Bengali cuisine’s penchant for resourcefulness and its traditional wisdom in preservation techniques. Moumita echoes Sibendu’s assessment on food access, or lack thereof, when she traces the logic of the ghaittya back to the haat bajaar or the weekly market. “In the villages you would not get fish or produce every day. People got most of their groceries from the haat bajaar and cooked what they procured there through the week,” she shares.
History, too, has played a seminal role in baking frugality into the psyche of the Bengali. In the 1740s, Maratha cavalry (Bargis) launched brutal annual raids on Bengal, looting granaries and destroying crops. This forced the peasantry to rely on neglected wild greens, roots, and peels. Then came the great famine during World War II, caused by a combination of a man-made catastrophe and a cyclone, leading to millions of deaths. The sheer absence of rice forced the population to consume alternatives like rice water or phyaan. Together with 1947 Partition, the Bargi invasions and the 1943 famine formed a trifecta of trauma that fundamentally reshaped Bengal’s relationship with food.
“It changed how we look at a plate of rice,” opines Amrita, who describes Bengal’s zero-waste cooking as a “culinary banking system”. This system involved techniques to elongate the life cycle of an ingredient, such as drying jackfruit seeds for later use and turning abundant mangoes into aamsotto (mango leather) or aamsi (dried green mangoes). Surplus fish was often dried in the sun or cured in salt, resulting in delicacies such as nona ilish (salted hilsa), shidol (fermented fish) or the aforementioned ghaittya. These acts of preservation and storage were essentially a method to “deposit food during times of abundance to be able to withdraw it during lean months,” she says.
For Avinandan Kundu, head chef at the Kolkata-based Sienna—a restaurant that has captured the imagination of the country’s gourmands with their creative take on Bengali food—much of this sustainable thinking is inseparable from the effect of class and caste. “You can’t talk about how people cooked without talking about what they were denied,” he asserts, highlighting how social fragmentation shaped what was considered ‘edible’. Certain foods, such as chicken—now a household favourite for weekends and celebrations—were once relegated to ‘peasant food’ by the oppressor castes.
Kochu shaak (taro leaves and stems) and googli (small freshwater snails), two great surviving food traditions of the Bengal famines, bear testimony to the region’s fortitude. “Many ingredients and techniques we now recognise as zero-waste came from disadvantaged [oppressed] caste communities that cooked with what was available to them, not what was prestigious. A chunk of zero-waste cooking comes from this intersection of constraint and ingenuity. Peels, stems, leaves, fish heads—nothing was optional waste when food itself was uncertain,” he says.
Certain foods, such as chicken—now a household favourite for weekends and celebrations—were once relegated to ‘peasant food’ by the oppressor castes.
Take the use of vegetable peels, for instance. There’s a plethora of culinary formats and preparation styles derived from the peels of potato, green banana, and a range of gourds. Crispy khosha bhaja (fried peels) and succulent khosha bata (mashed peels) are often uplifted with the pungent kick of mustard oil and flavouring agents like garlic, green chillies, and kalojire (nigella seeds). “The real flagbearers of scrappy cooking in Bengal are the batas [vegetables and peels made into a paste using a sil baata or grinding stone] and bhortas [boiled, charred or raw vegetables hand-mashed with seasonings until homogenous],” says Chef Avinandan, explaining how these dishes exist almost entirely to make use of what would otherwise be overlooked.
Old Tales on New Tables
The Bengali kitchen was, and in many ways still is, a masterclass in resourcefulness. Where else does the entire anatomy of a plant get transformed into a redolent dish? Medleys made using stems, stalks, leaves, and roots feature in what the community, in its onomatopoeic way (‘chorchor’ is meant to resemble the sound of sizzling), has christened chorchori. Leftover rice becomes panta bhaat; the fermented water from the rice becomes amani. Chhana-r jol or whey, left from the curdling of milk, is often used as a nutritious addition to various curries. Even today, the entirety of a fish is utilised: fat becomes machher teler bora (fish-oil nuggets), intestines and bones continue to anchor various chorchoris; and even scales are transformed into crispy aansh bhaja (fish-scale fritters).
This kind of nose-to-tail cooking was commonplace in the home of Auroni Mookerjee, a chef who is known for championing Bengal’s culinary culture. He is currently the chef-partner at Yokocho, Kolkata’s buzzy new East-Asian-inspired bar. A shared love for butchering brought him closer to his father, Aniruddha; at their table, the fisheye or head was as sought-after as the actual fish, while offal always invited a family-wide scramble. His family’s paya soup recipe embodies this spirit, where the mutton paya (legs) feature in a resplendent broth combining Bengal’s zero-waste sensibilities with flavours and techniques left behind by the Mughal rule.
These instincts—preserved in family kitchens and passed down through recipes—have also quietly travelled beyond Bengal’s borders. Sohini Banerjee remembers relishing chorchoris during afternoon lunches when she visited India for holidays. Of them, the daata chorchori made with moringa pods, potato, and radish leaves resonated so deeply that it earned a spot on the menu of her Bengali zero-waste supper club, Smoke and Lime, which she runs from her home in London. “This recipe speaks to me because it boasts of seasonality and simplicity. I have always heard the outlook that Indian food must be complicated, but this sort of dish is what our food is to me,” she says. Core tenets of Bengali cuisine have found their way into Sohini’s cooking in the United Kingdom, where the hunt for produce is governed by what’s fresh and available versus a strictly prescribed recipe. “Bengali food is so adaptable and the methods are what make the food, more so than the ingredients,” she adds.
Traditional codes of the Bengali kitchen are being reimagined and recontextualised by a new generation of Bengalis, like Sohini. At Yokocho, Chef Auroni is swapping out usual bar snacks like chips and peanuts with Korean-inspired banchans (small sides made of seasoned, stir-fried, and fermented vegetables) with traditional Bengali ingredients like pui (spinach), mulo (radish) greens, and shaak aloo (jicama) peels.
Even today, the entirety of a fish is utilised: fat becomes machher teler bora (fish-oil nuggets), intestines and bones continue to anchor various chorchoris; and even scales are transformed into crispy aansh bhaja (fish-scale fritters).
In Chef Avinandan’s kitchen at Sienna, the time-honoured tradition of using all parts of the banana plant finds new purchase in the mocha salad. “To form the base of the salad, we mixed up the shredded petals [of the banana blossom] with other seasonal vegetables like kacha pepe [raw papaya], kacha aam [raw mango], and lots of bhaja-bhuji [fried bits] in the form of coconut, onion, and peanuts,” he explains. The dish comes to a piquant crescendo, thanks to a spicy-sweet-sour garnish made of coconut and lime leaves. Endeavours such as Chef Auroni’s and Chef Avinandan’s prove that Bengal’s is an enduring culinary language that can very much thrive in the modern urban kitchen, too.
Bengal’s geography, made lush by the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta, where land and water are in constant dialogue, is what Chef Auroni describes as “diversity of terroir”. This landscape, one of the most fertile in the world, has naturally shaped a cuisine centred on rice, myriad varieties of fish and wild, water-loving greens. When met with histories of scarcity, these generous ingredients are used in their entirety from root to stem, nose to tail—techniques and stories that are often overlooked in lieu of Bengal’s (much more recent) legacy in fish, meat, and sweets.
Suman Mahfuz Quazi is a writer and creative director who makes sense of the world around her through food. Instagram @suman_quazi
Mouli Paul is a visual designer presently based in Kolkata. Her personal work centres around her travel experiences. Currently, her work has taken a documentary approach focusing on themes of home, belonging and identity, archives, and landscape. She has an MA in Photography from Arts University Plymouth and works as a photographer and communication designer for Sienna Calcutta. Instagram: @moulipaul.
Make daata chorchori at home with this recipe by Sohini Banerjee.
This article has been published as a part of The Locavore’s collaboration with Powerhouse Museum, Australia. Titled Setting The Table: Stories from India’s Food Cultures, it aims to highlight diverse undertold stories about India’s culinary landscape to a non-native reader, adding texture to global narratives about Indian food.
