My friend Deepak has been round the world in a lifetime of service for a leading MNC, sampling an incredible array of cultures. But wherever he has been, from his days as an articled clerk eking out an existence in London bedsitters, he has cooked with passion Indian meals for friends. Now as he divides his post-retirement days between Dubai, Brussels, London and Kolkata, he cooks virtually all his meals, no matter how minimal.
On his last visit “home”, he shared a grouse with me: you people have almost stopped entertaining at home. Whenever one of us invites a group of close friends over, it is at one of Kolkata’s clubs; even if it is at home, the food is catered out. The food is always excellent and the liquor superior, but still. The latest instance was of Swapan arranging an elaborate do at the Bengal Club to meet his granddaughter, all of a few months old. My wife, who couldn’t make it, kept repeating with unashamed regret: Oh, the Bengal Club food is so good. As if missing out on meeting the fraternity was secondary.
That may have been too large a group for home, but we seem to have fallen into a pattern. Come winter, there is a round-robin string of lavish meals – usually pegged to the visit of an NRI friend – that friends host by turns, yes, at a club or at home with the food.
The reasons for this are clear. We live in apartments that can take in at best a dozen guests, with the kitchen straining even more than the sitting area. On such occasions you need one or two people to chip in, but even two can be a crowd in today’s kitchens. If you do manage to get the food out without mishap, Indian cuisine leaves an overpowering trail of aroma for hours in an apartment.
But let’s face it. These are all secondary issues. Foremost is, few of the wives care to handle a meal for 10 or more, even when they have stopped working. Culturally we are at an interregnum. The wives have travelled far from the days when the lives of our mothers revolved round the kitchen and the high point of their day was when the family complimented them on a great meal. I can still remember the evening when around 20 of my college friends did justice to the great hilsa that my father had brought home and my mother had cooked. The division of responsibilities was clear. My father’s job was to buy A-class fish and my mother’s was to do a great job of cooking that and more. Of course, she had a full-time manservant to help.
But even as some of the wives have held down jobs without considering it a mission in life to be acknowledged as a great cook, the husbands have largely failed to step in to fill the gap. There is sometimes a generational gap too. My problem is that our children would rather pass up an item by me. While I, considering my age, try to cook healthy and tasty, the children find the result too bland.
It is not as though Bengali cuisine is dying with partial banishment from middle-class kitchens. The market has stepped in to fill the gap. Over a decade and more, several A-class restaurants have come up, serving with incredible accuracy and acumen just what mother would have cooked. So when you realise you have not tasted daab chingri (prawn cooked in coconut milk) in ages, you have to take the family out.
In fact, the genre is evolving. The best of the restaurants can no longer keep ahead by simply serving authentic home food, but are aggressively targeting fusion cuisine. The recently opened Bohemian, as it has come to be called, serves what it calls Bengali-Continental fare. We were charmed by several dishes that were flavoured by gandharaj lebu (a locally popular aromatic lime), but what took the cake or the dessert was a soufflé built on a base of aam satt (dried ripe mango cake).
So if there’s anything we are missing out on, it is not the right type of food but the quality of conversation. At home it is more unstructured and meaningful. You could be plonked on the floor before some on a sofa, the words flowing like a mountain stream skirting boulders, or a rivulet changing track on a floodplain every so often, which Bengal mostly is.
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