Mustard oil. Nigella seeds (kalonji). Potato sticks, the thinnest possible. And only long (not squat) green chillies. Put it all in a bowl and steam for half an hour. That’s the most straightforward recipe for what thousands of Bengalis call bati chochhori, a dish, when served with hot, slightly soggy rice, performs well on the comfort-food quotient.

But there’s a little more to this story, according to my mother. And that ‘little more’ is courtesy of Biju, a matronly figure who ruled the kitchen and hearts of a certain Ghosh family in Bhowanipore, a middle-class south Kolkata neighbourhood, for over two decades after Independence. A high-rimmed aluminium bowl — used more frequently for storing milk than cooking — made Biju’s bati chochhori stand out, as did the soft-boiled duck eggs she added as garnish. The runny yolks toned down the pungency of the mustard oil, making the Ghoshes, my mother among them, one happy bunch.

Widowed at 17, Biju lived and died on a radically vegetarian diet for the next 50 years. Dressed in white with her hair cropped and a string of tulsi beads around her neck, she excelled in cooking almost everything the orthodox dictates of widowhood kept off her own plate — fish, prawns, poultry and mutton. The taboos didn’t stop her from experimenting with animal protein. Her mentor, as is often the case, was her mother. In the humble kitchen of her village home in Orissa’s Cuttack district, the illiterate widow’s cooking lessons for the young Bijoylakshmi were mostly ‘stories’. She was too poor to buy most of the ingredients for the recipes she handed down orally.

Biju and her mother are less than a drop in the Indian ocean — the ocean of unsung innovators whose recipes, until quite recently, didn’t make their way into cookbooks or televised shows. Lost in the cauldron are the stories of nameless, faceless people whose experiments in the kitchen, for reasons social and otherwise, have peppered our menus with textures, colours and aromas.

With little standing within families, women saw the kitchen as their fiefdom and their cooking skills and experiments remained guarded secrets, as heirlooms, to win the approval of the menfolk and control other women, especially the daughters-in-law.

Hindu widows, relegated to a lonely corner of the cookhouse, top the list of the un-applauded chefs of India. Sitting over her own stove, the widow searched for variety in her restricted diet. Apart from meats, fish and eggs, the strictures prohibited consumption of masoor dal, onions, garlic, garam masala and even spinach in some eastern states. The outcome was a hidden treasury of recipes, using ingredients like vegetable peels and even seeds. Bengal’s famous chochhori and chhechki — vegetable mish-mash that are part of everyday meals in an average household — were born out of these experiments. As did the dishes that ‘mock’ forbidden foods: egg curry made with cottage cheese and lentils, raw jackfruit curry (which can pass of as mutton) and the bori (tiny lentil dumplings also known as vadi in north India).

In her short story ‘The Virgin Widow and Poppadams’ (published in The Little Magazine, 2007), Delhi-based journalist Sudha Tilak illustrates the culinary skills of her great grandmom Yechumi Pati who, despite her own ‘life of deprivation and bereavement’, “worked to the bone” to feed and comfort a large, noisy and forever-hungry brood. The story also throws light on how the widow, with the pallu covering her shaven head, reserved her afternoons for food experiments:

“Yechumi Pati was in charge of making preserves and pickles and making wheat and ragi wafers and sago vadams, lentil appalams and other fritters. These were usually outside the ambit of daily meal making and demanded elaborate preparations and skill... Then when the sun baked the roof to blazing proportions, she would tiptoe and hop on the burning terrace floor to spread huge sheets of damp fabric, usually her old torn nine-yard saris. On them, she would lay the round appalams and sago vadams to dry across the entire length and breadth of the roof.”

Secrets galore

Better known than the aunts, grandmothers and nannies who toiled round-the-clock without praise or acknowledgement, is the story of Haji Murad Ali. The one-armed khansama (nicknamed ‘tunda’ for his handicap) from Bhopal put Lucknow on the global culinary map with his melt-in-the-mouth gilawati kebabs and flaky paranthas. Tunday, the shop he set up in the busy Chowk area in 1899, made headlines last year when the founder-chef’s nephews (Ali died childless) went to court to settle a dispute over patenting the legacy. The court decided in favour of Mohammad Usmaan, grandson of Ali’s younger brother.

The legitimacy row may have died down, but the recipe that catapulted the nondescript eatery into the culinary Ivy League remains a mystery. In every interview — print and broadcast — Usmaan maintains that the ingredients used are a ‘family secret’. He also dodges questions on whether the magic formula is in the safety of a bank locker, just like the ones for Coca-Cola and Kentucky Fried Chicken.

The internet is flooded with ‘guesswork’ recipes for the Tunday kebab. Some claim that at least 160 ingredients go into it, while others attribute the unique taste to sandalwood. The genesis of the Tunday story goes back to the royal patronage of chefs by the Nawabs of Awadh. It is said the recipe was created to sate the cravings of a toothless Nawab, who had offered a handsome reward for it. More than 50 kg of the kebab, with an overpowering taste of garam masala, are sold every day from the greasy counter of the Chowk establishment.

A refreshing and light-hearted take on ‘guarded-with-life’ family secrets, is the 2012 Bollywood film Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana. It tells the story of Omi (Kunal Kapoor), the vilait-returned Punjabi man who seeks refuge in his ancestral house to escape creditors. The other reason behind his trip home is the revival of Chicken Khurana, a family recipe that made its dhaba a name to reckon with. Unfortunately, the man who created the dish — Omi’s grandfather, lovingly called Daarji — is senile and ailing. Through a series of trials and errors, Omi and childhood sweetheart Harman (Huma Qureshi) finally discover the secret ingredient that gave Chicken Khurana a distinct edge.

The other bits

The story of the Bandel cheese, a small but significant roundel of heritage, is yet another secret. Several cookbooks tell us that it was born in India, Bengal to be precise, under Portuguese supervision. In 1579, Akbar granted Pedro Tavares the permission to build a church and a town. That explains the birth of Bandel, a few hours from Kolkata, on the banks of the Hooghly river. By the end of the century, the town became a hub of wealthy Portuguese traders, who lived in luxurious riverside mansions.

The men who cooked for the European settlers came from the hill tracts of Chittagong. Known as Mogs, the tribals quickly learnt the art of Portuguese cooking. And it was probably one of them who invented the Bandel cheese, one of the few local varieties that India can boast of. The hard, salty, pungent cheese, available in pebble-size packs, often accompanies pastas, salads and risottos. And only two shops in Kolkata’s beloved New Market sell it. The Bandel cheese is not made in Bandel anymore. The only information available is that it comes from a Kolkata factory.

Given the lack of our own versions of the English Mrs Beeton or the American TV celebrity cook Julia Child, Indian recipes have long remained lost among family lore and cooking traditions. Meenakshi Ammal and her Cook and See series come the closest to a cooking bible of sorts for South Indians, as does The Calcutta Cook Book by Minakshie Das Gupta, Bunny Gupta and Jaya Chaliha in Bengal. These, too, were published long after the families had passed down handwritten recipes from the elder matrons. Much like our epics that metamorphosed from their oral and regional retellings into a TV avatar since the 1990s, cooking and recipes moved from the homestead to a public forum after cookery shows became popular on TV.

A post-liberalisation economy, nuclear families, well-travelled Indians itching to try different cuisines all added to the demand for cookbooks and cookery shows. Today, many young women are chronicling their secret home recipes into family cookbooks — think, Aparna Jain’s The Sood Family Cookbook or Cooking Up A Storm, a compilation of Odiya family recipes by Suneeta and Susmita Misra. But be warned… even today, many an Indian mother-in-law may not part with that secret ingredient that melts her son’s heart over a plateful of his favourite food. Food, the fastidious cook would tell you, is magic. Despite the onslaught of Masterchefs and highway eating, a foolproof recipe will always remain a guarded secret, much like the locked spice-box of yesteryear’s major-domo matrons.

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