BharatSangraha

Sundarbans · Middle & Lower Gangetic Plain

Foodways

A kitchen built on what a tidal creek gives up and what will grow on land that goes salty. Crab, prawn, mudskipper and the small brackish-water fish are the everyday protein; hilsa arrives with the monsoon at the river mouths; rice comes from a single main aman crop grown behind embankments, with salt-tolerant landraces kept precisely because a breach is expected. Coconut is used far more than in the western delta because it grows on the embankment line, and sweet water is the scarce ingredient — many islands depend on a handful of deep tubewells and on rainwater ponds that are the first thing salt ruins. The result is a version of the Bengali sequence with the same grammar and different nouns: the fish is a crab, the mustard is the same, the coconut is heavier, and the sweet at the end is made with date-palm gur for the ten weeks a year it exists.

Primary cooking medium

Mustard oil, raw and cooked, as everywhere in the deltaCoconut milk and grated coconut, used more heavily here than upriverCrab and prawn fat, scraped from the shell and cooked into the gravy

Dominant sour agents

TamarindGreen mango and dried aamsottoLime, and gondhoraj zest where it can be gotKul, the jujube, in the winter chutneyWild hental and mangrove-fringe fruits used occasionally in village cooking

Spice register

Sharper and hotter than the western delta's and closer to eastern Bengali practice — more green chilli, more raw mustard paste, no sugar in a savoury dish, and nigella used liberally. Against the Kolkata side, the difference is a refusal to soften anything; against the Rarh kitchen inland, the difference is that almost nothing is ground dry, because the flavour work is done by paste and by coconut.

Staple grains and carbs

Aman rice, the single main crop, transplanted after the monsoon has flushed the saltSalt-tolerant rice landraces — Dudheswar, Talmugur, Hamilton and Nona Bokra among those still sownMuri and chire, the working staples on a boatKanakchur khoi, a small aromatic paddy puffed for Joynagar moa

Preservation methods

Shutki — sun-dried fish and prawn, made on the mudflat and on boat roofsNolen gur and patali, boiled down from date-palm sap between December and FebruaryWild honey and beeswax, cut and processed in the licensed seasonSalted and sun-dried crab and prawn for the lean monthsBori, sun-dried lentil nuggets, made in the same dry window as the gur

Signature techniques

Wild comb cutting

A honey party locates a comb of the giant rock bee in the forest canopy or on a low branch, smokes it with a bundle of green leaves, cuts away the honey-bearing portion and leaves the brood. The work is done on foot, inside closed forest, by a group who move in a line with one man watching backwards, because a tiger will approach from behind. The season is short and licensed, and the party pays a royalty by weight.

Also found in: Bastar

Date-palm sap tapping

The tapper shaves a strip of bark from the crown of a Phoenix sylvestris palm, sets a spout and hangs a pot overnight. The first sap of the season gives the lightest, most aromatic gur; by February the same tree yields a darker, less prized sap. The window is about ten weeks and the product is dated by it.

Also found in: Rarh, Bengal Delta

Crab picking and shell cooking

Mud crabs are caught in creek traps or hooked by hand from burrows at low water, cooked whole in the shell so the fat sets rather than leaks, and eaten by breaking. The gravy is built after the shell has gone in, not before, which is the opposite of how a fish curry is built here.

Also found in: Utkal, South Konkan

Bhape and paturi

The delta's steaming and leaf-wrapping method, applied here to crab, prawn and small brackish fish as well as to hilsa. Raw mustard paste and raw mustard oil are sealed in with the fish so nothing volatile is cooked off.

Also found in: Bengal Delta, Tripura Hills & Plains

Salt-flush cultivation

After a surge or a breach, the field is deliberately left to the monsoon for one or more seasons so that rain leaches salt down out of the root zone, and salt-tolerant landraces are sown before the improved varieties are risked again. It is agronomy as damage control, and it is why old seed is kept rather than replaced.

Also found in: Utkal

Shutki drying on the flat

Small fish and prawn are gutted, salted and laid on bamboo racks or on the bare mudflat in the dry months. The eastern Sundarbans does this at commercial scale on seasonal drying camps; the western side does it mostly for the household.

Also found in: Utkal, Brahmaputra Valley

The foodway signature of Sundarbans — cooking medium, souring agents, spice register, staple grains and the techniques that define it. (6)