toujours_nigel: plum cake with pomegranate seeds on a blue-work stoneware plate (omnomnom)
rheaitis ([personal profile] toujours_nigel) wrote2018-12-06 10:14 am
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December Discourse: 02

[personal profile] moetushie asked for Bengali food.

[personal profile] dragonlady7 was looking at options for a real-world ethnicity for Bodhi Rook for The Sled Dog Guy Mystery, and she wasn't very happy with just giving him Riz Ahmed's.
"Why not Bengali Hindu/Buddhist," I said, ever so innocent. "I mean, I could give you pointers for all the culinary stuff, if you did that."
Reader, she made him a Bengali Hindu, and I did try my best to help with the culinary stuff. Mostly I shoved her at wikipedia, iirc.

Look, I have a complicated and at times hostile relationship with Bengali food. I don't eat riverine fish, I can't eat non-fish seafood, and sea fish are prohibitively expensive and I don't much like that either. It's a shock nobody's de-ethnicised me.
Anyhow. Bengali food is just... food, y'know, what I grew up eating, the unmarked category. Of course I later realised what I was eating was probably closer to East Bengali/Bangladeshi cuisine than not, because my mother's side is entirely and my father's side half East Bengali, even if my grandparents were all on this side when Partition went into effect. I didn't realise this in school or even undergrad, because of course it all *sounded* like the same food: dal dal bhat bhat it's the fucking same. I even avoided getting drawn into the hilsa/crab dialogue because I don't eat crab (allergies, aptly enough inherited from my mother).
Instead! I realised there were culinary differences in my first year of Masters, when my roommate, who could cook and was therefore capable of rescuing me from the university mess' notion of Andhra food, turned out to define everything very differently than me. She used different words for dishes! When she used the same words she cooked them differently! Bengali food was suddenly a marked category! It was all very upsetting.
The reason we're still together is [personal profile] filia_noctis is a nice and tolerant woman who took my bewildered rage nicely. She's also entirely and extremely West Bengali, so we still disagree on most things, like sugar v. chillies in food, and what vegetable best accompanies hilsa, and what oil to use.

The complicated and hostile part of things, other than allergies and aversions, is that I'm fairly indifferent to Bengali food, partly because it's just normal food not worth getting excited about, but also because I don't know how to cook it. I learnt cooking in my Masters, where my mother's instructions over the phone were difficult, online recipes inadequate or overly complicated, and [personal profile] filia_noctis' valiant attempts largely if indeterminately off. So instead I use onion-garlic with everything, when most iconic Bengali Hindu dishes abjure both as they were forbidden for widows; I also primarily cook a violently-simplified Italian for preference, because again garlic in everything and also tomatoes. Bengali food I love the first fortnight I'm at home, but can't reproduce, so my liking for it--such as it is--is a very childish liking for this is how home tastes. It doesn't help that our cook is incompetent at best.

What I do really miss is street food, the snacks available in every sweetshop and several snack-shacks; the cutlets and rolls and puddings of the Raj; the Calcutta-iterations of both Mughlai and "Chinese", adapted by the Lucknow and Chinese/Tibetan diaspora in the city: all the culinary heterogeneity of a port.
dragonlady7: self-portrait but it's mostly the DSLR in my hands in the mirror (Default)

[personal profile] dragonlady7 2018-12-05 05:35 pm (UTC)(link)
I loved that Bodhi and I wish I'd been able to spend more time with him. I have a whole bunch of half-written noodling scenes that were going to be him learning to cook and always wound up being other things. It would be such a fascinating fic, and yet, it would be so much research and probably would wind up being for a very small audience.

Maybe I could file the serial numbers off and start over and just write a meditative little m/m romance about a lost disavowed depressed Desi self-exile in central New York trying to teach himself to cook his half-remembered mother's food from what he can get at the Price Chopper and finding unlikely love in the process, but I'd really have to start over. I was just remembering that fic, though, as winter settles down heavily on us here-- there was a bit where another delivery driver had left his van idling to warm up and Bodhi got yelled at for it, and I thought of that the other, snowy morning as I walked past people's driveways with their cars idling in them to warm up, either too long, wastefully, or not long enough and they're out there with their ice scrapers and grim faces.

I loved reading this post, by the way. I have a whole other comment I was going to write, that I've been pondering a long time, about what it must be like to be-- in a place, like, currently and ancestrally, and I don't know how to talk about it at all. My ancestors have been in this area since 1620, only, and I have no direct connections to anywhere else, and all we have is this weirdly aggressively-homogenized New National Identity. I have the problem that I won't eat at Italian restaurants because that's home food why pay so much for it, but I'm not Italian in any way (and that's goofy, Italian food in restaurants here is amazing). I don't know what my ancestors ate. I genuinely don't think chicken needs much seasoning. I'm a disaster.
My mother wasn't taught to cook as a young girl. She learned after she married, from a cookbook. Some of what she makes is the way she remembers her grandmother cooking it, but it's only her approximation. Her mother cooked only from boxed mixes and cans because it was The New Way. We have no direct tradition, just the outlines of traditions that are remembered.
Anyway-- I don't have a coherent way of talking about it. I'm so fascinated by people that do have-- I guess identities, and the focus on the culinary is so interesting because it's so deep-seated and visceral and universal.
tl;dr I would read more about this every goddamn day, lol.
dragonlady7: self-portrait but it's mostly the DSLR in my hands in the mirror (Default)

[personal profile] dragonlady7 2018-12-06 08:39 pm (UTC)(link)
I will leave that fic in my little list of Somedays. I really need to focus and finish one or the other or the other or...

The whole idea of having a well-defined regional identity and cuisine is... I mean, it's more nebulous than it seems, anywhere, I'm sure! But the US has this... like... national obsession with default-ness, I think. We are allowed to be Super Into bits of our identity that are approved, but anything we do that's genuinely different is pretty heavily suppressed from within.
And viewing yourself as The Default is surprisingly... flattening, I think. Like, I know academically that i have an accent, but I don't actually recognize that. (Audio recordings are a bit traumatic, honestly.) And I know that the foods in my vernacular do constitute a unique cuisine of some kind, but I am genuinely baffled at how to categorize it.

Like... out here, 300 miles west of where I grew up, there are a lot of vernacular foods, but almost all of them I can easily call to mind are *restaurant* food, requiring equipment no one has in their homes to properly make. (Commercial pizza ovens and deep fryers and meat slicers yield drastically different results than home equipment.) Pizza, wings, beef on weck sandwiches-- nobody can make those at home. They're things you buy. If you ask people about Buffalo food, it's all these restaurant things they come up with.
My home region, though, is defined not really by cities, and we didn't really have many local restaurants when I was a child, so there's not the same commercial-food identity. I ate only at chain restaurants with corporate menus, as a child; the Friendly's in Troy has an identical menu to the Friendly's in Los Angeles, because that's how corporate chains work.

Homemade foods, though-- I mean, a lot of people have Legendary Family Recipes for things like chili or Italian red sauce. When Dude's Gram died, as she was not yet cold the various family members stood around her deathbed (i am not exaggerating, we arrived just after they had turned off the screaming flatline heart monitor and pulled the sheet up, and this conversation occurred immediately) and listed off her various important family recipes to find out who had inherited them. (Dude's sister has the German potato salad recipe and won't give it to us. It involves inordinate vinegar. I grew up never having eaten German potato salad, though, so I've no idea how it compares to normal.)
So there are definitely traditional things, and they definitely vary significantly by... striation, but what those striations specifically are, it's hard to say.

And the stuff you just eat every day for dinner-- I mean, clearly, there's regional identities in that. (my mother's meatloaf and Dude's mother's meatloaf are significantly different animals; his mom's has vegetables in it, which I find puzzling.) (both mothers made mostly recipes out of cookbooks, and often the same cookbooks, but the daughter of 11 generations of Americans is going to have different seasoning tastes than the daughter of Latvian refugees... but it's subtle.)

It is all very interesting to contemplate and clearly, I have absolutely zero expertise or academic background in any of this.

And oh, another dimension even-- Farmsister worked as a pastry chef in the Midwest, before farming, and she and my mother now have a long-running one-upmanship kind of relationship over their pie crusts. My mother religiously relies upon Crisco, and my sister will only use home-rendered lard. My mother talks a big line about local foods, but my sister special-orders her flour in bulk from a local mill, and won't cook with anything else, and in her quest for efficiency has eliminated all white flours from her house and now only has whole wheat. It is fascinating to live through, and of course, if they both make pies, I win, so.
moetushie: Beaton cartoon - a sexy revolution. (Default)

[personal profile] moetushie 2018-12-13 02:24 pm (UTC)(link)
Shit, sorry I didn see this. Totally makes sense, though. I support your hilsa antipathy!
moetushie: Beaton cartoon - a sexy revolution. (Default)

[personal profile] moetushie 2018-12-13 05:22 pm (UTC)(link)
I love hilsa roe but it makes me soooooo guilty. So I eat it very, very rarely.
Edited 2018-12-13 17:22 (UTC)
moetushie: Beaton cartoon - a sexy revolution. (Default)

[personal profile] moetushie 2018-12-14 01:28 am (UTC)(link)
It's true ;;