A request for shukto for lunch the next day left my mother slightly bewildered. I was home on vacation after two years of living abroad and was determined to get my hands on most of the dishes I grew up eating at home, especially the vegetarian varieties that I never quite appreciated as a child — shukto being one of them.
In the many years of living away from home, I realised that it is almost always possible to find or recreate the ‘meaty’ delights, which typically don’t require seasonal produce. Your greens, on the other hand, remain elusive. Sure, we inhabit this global-glocal world where arguably most things can be procured, but the taste of home, even without a generous helping of nostalgia, is something that is hard to attain, when far away.
Vegetarian Bengali cuisine's origins can be traced to a sombre start in the early 18th and19th centuries when the widows in the state were prohibited from eating ‘aamish’ or non-vegetarian foods, that in Bengal also include masoor dal, onion and garlic. Being forced to maintain a meagre niramish (vegetarian) diet, they began to innovate from the little that they were allowed – leafy greens and the not-so-fancy vegetables growing in the backyard.
Thus began the practice of using every part of the plant to create a dish out of it. From roots, stems, leaves, to even flowers and peels... these women saw potential in everything.
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Slurrp's contributing writer Kusumita Das evocatively explores vegetarian Bengali cuisine.
