A fish out of water tastes good

FOODIE

If you are acquainted with artist Jaysree Burman's incredibly detailed works, you will agree that she is extremely rooted in her culture. When I finally meet her on a late afternoon "" after having trailed her on the phone through Bangalore, Kolkata and the US, to persuade her to cook us some of her famous fish "" she is taking a break from painting Mother Nature, inspired by her golden, beloved Bengal; a prayer that its bounties never cease and that the land remains as fruitful as ever, since, as she tells me, "this year, agriculture has not been so good". She is just back from Kolkata, after the pujos, a trace of the sindoor of traditional married women and goddesses still visible. She courteously asks us about jol, hastily switches over to a mix of Hindi and English, the lyricism of her language still in place. But all these are not the reasons why I can't imagine her at any other place in the capital but here: in Chittaranjan Park, Delhi's own piece of Cal.

Like typical Bengalis, Burman has to have her fish daily. (She is on a diet these days, she rues, and when I point out that fish is healthy, she points out that "Bengali fish is not" since what is the point of having it without rice?) And like most people fond of their food, she loves to go shopping for it herself.

That's only from Market-1, in C R Park. As I listen to her tales about growing up in a huge household in Kolkata, she lets out a secret to good fish preparations. "It lies in the washing," she says, and adds, "We have a saying that the more you wash the fish, the sweeter it will be."

The other trick is in choosing the fish. Burman says that she chooses rohu for our recipe, "not larger than four kgs" since the bones are not too fine as in a smaller fish, while a larger fish is too fatty and thus not healthy.

This attention to food even defined her childhood. Burman remembers with relish the brunches she shared with her cousin at eight am every morning.

In a household where 12-14 people would be having disparate breakfasts at the same time, this cousin would mix his rice, dal, aloo bhaja and a squeeze of Gandhraj lemon deliciously and feed her morsels with his own hands. On special occasions, her mother would cook delicate flavours, the intricate chittol macchear muitha (steamed fish balls in gravy), for instance, a dish typically made when sons-in-law come visiting!

Burman herself took to cooking much later, in her room in Santiniketan, where the food wasn't so good. Today, with her husband, artist Paresh Maity, being not so fond of Western food, she confesses to travelling with kalaunji and panchphoran spices and creating her own simple recipes with whatever is locally available. But then, that's the artist.