In the 1830s, an interesting collaboration was being worked out between three men of Burdwan and Calcutta, resulting in an oddball venture. The said men were the Maharaja of Burdwan His Highness Mahtab Chand Rai (also known as Chuni Lal Kapoor), who had an ancestry of Lahore and was a connoisseur of art and education, as well as their funder; the second, a Bengali man named Bipradas Mukhopadhyay, who was a writer, editor and a food enthusiast with a pedagogic mind; and the third, a businessman and publisher who owned a printing press called Nitrayalal Sil. Together, they published the first-ever cookbook of India and the first one written in Bengali called Pakrajeshwar in 1831. This was the beginning of cookbooks followed by many more. The speciality of Pakrajeshwar was not only its recipes but also the listing of ingredients used along with a description of their health benefits – all in a compendium format.
“Cookbooks, which usually belong to the humble literature of complex civilisations, tell unusual cultural tales,” states anthropologist Arjun Appadurai. His statement fits snug for Bengali cookbooks that were getting published in Calcutta, with Pakrajeshwar as the torchbearer.
By 1858, Mukhopadhyay’s second book titled Byanjon Ratnakar was out. His books were groundbreakers, timed well, for there were no references of modern cookbooks written in Bengali other than the intermittent depictions of everyday life, and some impressions of eating habits and local produce in Chandimangal and Annadamangal. These eulogy literatures threw some light on what was eaten by Bengal’s caste-conscious society. There was the indigenous hunter-gatherer couple Kalketu and Phullara, and Lahana and Khullana, who were the two wives of the affluent merchant called Dhanapati – all characters from Chandimangal. While Kalketu and Phullara’s meals consisted of their unsold hunt proceeds like boars and porcupine, the merchant family ate elaborate, hearty meals of fish, vegetables and dairy. A more recent Mangal Kabyo, Annadamangal was more adventurous in its depiction of food and mentions tortoise eggs and dried fish, which in the 19th century were considered blasphemous by the upper-caste Hindu Bengalis.
Medieval Mangal Kabyo texts are not adequate referrals. To understand what Bengalis ate, one needs to fall back on cookbooks written over the last two centuries. “The proliferation of presses, journals, and books in the 19th-century colonial context did, among other things, usher in the prototypes of the modern cookbook.” Even though the modern-day cookbook Pakrajeshwar had a second edition, there was a long gap of 27 years between Mukhopadhyay’s two publications.
Mukhopadhyay was heavily influenced by multiple textual sources, from the ancient Indian cooking manual called Ksemakutuhalam by Khsemsharma, who was employed in the court of King Vikramaditya, to Puranic references, to the Mughal cookbook called Nuskha-i-Shahjahani, written during Shah Jahan’s regime.
“In 1889, Bipradas Mukhopadhyay brought out Soukhin-khadya-pak part one, which included instructions on the cooking of kheoarccnna (rice, lentils, spices and fat), khichudi pullao, rich
curry, korma, shishkebab, kofta, cutlets and chops. Part two included English food.” The two volumes were then collated to publish Pak Pranali in 1906, which also included some recipes from the namesake monthly magazine which Mukhopadhyay edited.
Pak Pranali turned out to be his most significant work. The singular effort with which Mukhopadhyay advocated renewed culinary learning was remarkable, all the while emphasising modernity (read contemporariness). In Pak Pranali, he creates a mind-boggling world of recipes. Shifting from refined Bangla, these recipes were written in a simpler version of the vernacular. Even before one leafs through the recipe section, the “Introduction” bares open Mukhopadhyay’s idea of good food, which is always nutritive and one made with care.
The opening disclaimer compares the mortal Bengali wives and mothers with the Hindu goddess of food, Devi Annapurna (Lord Shiva’s wife). The author is upfront about his preference for food being cooked at home and states that there is substitute for good home-cooked food. He harps on how satisfying it is for a woman to cook for her husband and children, who would always be looking for her caring touch in all the meals that were served.
Spread over 16 chapters, the introductory one begins with a discussion on the ideal kitchen and pantry as well as their upkeep. Insisting on an airy, well-lit pantry, the author emphasises on strict cleanliness. He also doles out useful tips such as frequent dusting and the occasional sunbathing of the reserve grains as well as of the pickles and ghee, which would eventually help keep the pantry hygienic and pest-free.
The kitchen management segment in Bipradas Mukhopadhyay’s book is inspired from the English (read scientific) way of life. Meredith Borthwick writes in Shadow or Substance: “Women carried out the daily domestic routine within the antahpur, an inner courtyard surrounded by a kitchen and living apartments. The male recreation and reception area was located beyond this, around an outer courtyard from which there was access to the public street.” She adds: “Although the outer apartments were usually reasonably commodious and airy, the antahpur was dingy. Cooking-rooms without proper chimneys, and smoky outlets generally, form part of these dwelling apartments.”
For the more affluent families, there were rooftops, often the only source of unhindered sunlight. It was in this lone open space that women stole their moments of gossip and pastime. The imperative of keeping a kitchen and pantry clean and well-lit advocated by Mukhopadhyay perhaps finds a rationale. Further in the book, he chooses to list all the vegetables and spices that were used frequently and enumerates more than 200 recipes. With each entry, the author comments on the
nutritive and therapeutic aspects of these ingredients, referring to Ayurvedic texts tagged as Vaidya Shastra.
Excerpted with permission from Calcutta On Your Plate, by Nilosree Biswas. Photographs by Irfan Nabi.