Newbie restauranteur Rajyasree Sen of Brown Sahib gives the humble mishti doi a new twist.
She’s busy promoting her new restaurant, Brown Sahib, but Rajyasree Sen is more than enthusiastic to prepare one of her restaurant’s popular dishes for us. “The restaurant is like an extension of my home in Kolkata,” she says. For someone who grew up in a traditional Bengali household, it’s not surprising that the food served at Brown Sahi is authentic Bengali cuisine. “We also have Anglo-Indian dishes, many of which I ate as a kid,” says Sen, who adds that she has attempted to bring a slice of her own childhood days to the restaurant. No wonder, the art work, artefacts, and even the furnishings inside the restaurant make Brown Sahib look homely and comfortable. “That was the idea,” beams Sen, adding, “Brown Sahib should, hopefully, leave guests with the feeling that they have entered an elegant, hospitable, traditional Bengali home which celebrates food and the finer things in life.”
Busy getting all the ingredients in place for one of the restaurant’s signature desserts that she is preparing for us, Sen tells us that the first time she ventured into the family kitchen was to make cheese omelettes for her brother. “Later, I graduated to baking desserts, and when I shifted to Mumbai to live on my own, I started preparing fancier fare like chingri malai curry, roast chicken, shepherd’s pie and khao suey too,” she adds.
Born into a household which “celebrated the more aesthetic aspects of life”, Sen remembers watching her grandmother and parents prepare lavish dinners that included roast duck with sausage stuffing, Scotch eggs and many Bengali delicacies such as shukto, ilish maacher (fish) biryani, to name a few. “All meals were always cooked at home, and guests sat down at our massive round glass-topped table and relished their meal course by course,” she laughs.
Her early culinary experiences helped Sen try newer cuisines from a very young age. “I remember our cook preparing the most divine kuler aachar, a sweet and sour pickle made from berries. The berries would be dried in the sun for days and then slow-cooked with jaggery and spices and kept in a bottle for days.” Another favourite was her grandmother’s duck korma which followed a tedious process of marination for almost 36 hours, followed by slow cooking the duck. “I also used to eat the fish curry which was cooked for the staff in our home because it was spicy and tasty,” says Sen.
Food is a way of life for Sen and that’s the reason she says that Brown Sahib opened. “This culture of spending evenings over fine food at the dining table was missing once I moved to Mumbai and, later, Delhi. Since I love cooking, entertaining people and trying out new recipes, I felt like introducing it to Delhi,” she says.
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No wonder all the recipes that are on the restaurant’s menu have been “personally cooked and tried out”.
Like we said, food is a way of life for Sen.
FAVOURITE RECIPE
Bhapa doi
500 gm low fat natural yogurt
400 gm condensed milk
4 green cardamoms
About 10-12 saffron strands
2 tbsp milk
Handful of broken dried nuts including cashew, pistachio
Preheat the oven to 190° centigrade. Put the cardamoms in a large shallow baking tray in the oven for about five minutes. Heat the milk with the saffron strands in the microwave for 10 seconds and leave until later.
In the meantime, mix the yogurt and condensed milk together until smooth. Crush the cardamoms and stir them into the cheesecake mix. Add the dried nuts as well while leaving some for the garnishing later.
Fill a baking dish with the yogurt. Place in the large, shallow baking tray. Fill this tray with enough hot water to come half way up to the ramekin/dish. Then, carefully place the whole lot in the oven for 10 minutes.
After this time, spoon a couple of saffron strands and a little bit of the milk on top of the yogurt. Sprinkle the remaining nuts. Keep cooking for another five minutes until the cheesecake has set. Try the fork-test to find out if the dish is done and make sure the fork comes out clean. Leave to sit for 10 minutes and then refrigerate before serving.