Country Captain, Mutton Birinchi & Ilish-er Ulhas

In a collaboration dating back to the 1830s between Burdwan and Calcutta, three men came together in an oddball venture. Mahtab Chand Rai (also known as Chuni Lal Kapoor) was the Maharaja of Burdwan, a well-known connoisseur of art and education. Bipradas Mukhopadhayay was a food enthusiast, author and editor. Nityalal Sil was a businessman and publisher who owned a printing press. The outcome was a cookbook called ‘Pak Rajeshwar’ (1831), which is believed to be the first printed cook book published in Bengal and possibly in India!

This became a trend setter.

‘Pak Rajeshwar’ was followed by Bipradas`s Byanjan Ratnakar in 1858 and Soukhin khadya- pak in two volumes in1883. While Pak Rajeshwar and Byanjan Ratnakar remain historically important, being respectively the first and the second published cookbooks of India, it was Soukhin-khadya-pak (A Discourse of Culinary Delicacies) that left greater impact and paved the way to more cookbooks with more innovative recipes.

In a smart act Bipradas combined the two volumes of Soukin- khadya- pak to a namesake cookbook Pak Pranali (1906), derived from his popular monthly magazine (1883) also by the same name. He wrote that the aim of the book was to revive the lost art of Bengali cooking. To that he drew multiple references from ancient Indian cooking manual called Khsemkutuhol by Khsem Sharm active in the reign of king Vikramaditya, impressions of Mughal cooking from Nuskha-e-Shahjahani a text written during the reign of Shah Jahan. In addition, he borrowed recipes for delicacies from his patron Mehtab Chand Rai`s royal kitchen. The Maharaja claimed his ancestry to Lahore.

Spread over sixteen chapters, each entry mentioned the recipe’s nutritional and therapeutic value according to Ayurvedic texts.

The author favoured the newly introduced potatoes and gives the tip to retain the potato skin while boiling in order to retain its nutritive value. This was1906 and a host of hitherto unfamiliar vegetables like cabbage, cauliflower and carrots were introduced to the Bengali kitchen along with potatoes.

From boiled to baked, to braised, to deep fried, to simple gravy, dry, thin and thick curries, Pak Pranali did not leave any stone unturned.

Just the sheer variety of recipes is mind boggling for a cook book of that era!

It included:

• a Jewish fish fry
• an English chop
• a French lamb cutlet
• a pineapple pulao, a tangerine or orange pulao
• an Arabic jasmine pulao, Pishpash or mutton rice
• mutton omelette
• Egg Moghlai kofta
• Mach Bhaete (Mashed fish) Phoolkopi Bhaete (Mashed Cauliflower)
• Rohu English Curry
• hasty pudding
• plum pudding
• Italian Lamb Pie
• German pudding and many more.

And all of these coexisted with conventional Bengali platter of dal (lentil soup),bhaja (anything deep fried) and bhaté (boiled while the rice is cooking or separately and then mashed with salt and condiments).

As a culinary author he was evidently prodding his women readers to experiment with ‘new’ ingredients like oranges (Orange Pulao), pineapple (Pineapple Pulao), or black cardamom (Noor Jahani Fish Kebab) and the humble potato (Potato Cutlets) of course.

Pragyasundari Devi`s Amish O Niramish Ahar came out in 1901. Even after 113 years Amish O Niramish Ahar still holds its ground, and is considered a cult cookbook in the language with many successful editions. The present edition has more than 1,500 recipes. In a brief Introduction to the current edition Pragyasundari`s granddaughter Ira Ghosh notes how prolific her grandmother was.

She says, “It is believed that Pragya had contributed to the creation of Icmic Cooker and Indubhushan Mallick wanted to dedicate the patent to her. However, she did not accept his offer”. Icmic by the way was an early steam cooker that was conceived mainly to cut down on cooking time. Her recipes were strikingly innovative as well, with unheard of patriotic names like Rammohan Dolma Pulao, (dedicated to reformer, educator Raja Rammohan Ray) or Vidyasagar Barfi (dedicated to Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, an advocate of women`s education) and ‘Kobi Sangbardhana Barfi’; a special sweetmeat made of cauliflower, celebrating poet laureate Rabindranath Tagore`s 50th birthday in 1911. Tagore happened to be her paternal grandfather.

An unusual combination of ingredients, and fashionable exotic names were signature to a lot of her dishes. In fact, it is still not easy to pinpoint the cultural specificity of many of them. For example, Indral, Ilisher Ulhas, Isafu, Karan Kuku, Mutton Birinchi, Murgir Hoteli Pulao, and so on.

Intelligent tweaks made them unique like in Isafu, a prawn recipe, the author includes eggplant as a combination to go with prawns (usually eggplant is combo for Hilsa fish in Bengal) or Aloo Mekhala a new name that Pragyasundari came up with for the good old ‘Country Captain’, a popular, hurriedly cooked Anglo Indian meat dish with chicken. In Pragyasundari`s version mutton substitutes chicken along with additional yogurt and other spices. Her innovations followed fusion or the emerging hybridity in early twentieth century Kolkata.

Both Pak Pranali and Amish O Niramish Ahar remain an eclectic collection of recipes. They resonate Bengali cosmopolitanism stemming from the heart of the city that had given itself the epithet of being “St. Petersburg of the East”.