December Discourse: 02

[toujours_nigel]

moetushie asked for Bengali food.

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 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 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.

Comments

[dragonlady7]

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.

[moetushie]

Shit, sorry I didn see this. Totally makes sense, though. I support your hilsa antipathy!