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Ranna barri: the fount of taste, aroma and traditions in W Bengal...

posted on Monday, August 25, 2008 12:03 PM

The ranna bari is literally ‘the cookhouse’, the epicentre of domestic Bengali life. The storage, cooking and eating areas in a West Bengal home is nearly always a separate unit. This barrack-like cookhouse was a row of rooms running parallel to a wide airy veranda often used as the dining area. One of the first things that we realised was this room had the most rituals and customs attached to it. India is a much ritualised society at the best of times.

In orthodox Hindu Bengali homes, fish and vegetables were cooked over separate fires, rice over another and meat, if cooked at all, was done on a portable fire outside the kitchen.

The most important aspect of a joint family in Bengal was eating together, food from the same handi (communal cooking pot) prepared from the same henshel (hearth).

The staple, rice, was stored for the whole year in enormous terracotta jars and allowed to age. In all homes there is always a small store of the long-grained, fragrant Basmati from Peshawar to be used in biryani and polau. The Dehra Dun variety of Basmati now used instead and is said to have been introduced by the family of Amanullah Khan, the Afghan ruler who was exiled to India in the last century.

Wheat was not grown in Bengal and was not a supplementary cereal till the Japanese entered World War II and the ration system for rice, wheat, sugar and textiles was introduced for the first time in Calcutta.

Pure golden mustard oil, that pungent Bengali cooking medium, is always stored in zinc lined tins. In another row, eighteen kilograms of the best ghee were specially transported from far away Khurja in undivided Punjab.

In some Bengali homes there is the presence of a widowed relative who has her own stove which no else is allowed to touch. She has added a delicate nuance to the rich vegetarian cornucopia of Bengali cooking. Up to the turn of the century, a young wife was widowed and lived for the rest of her life dressed in white with her hair cropped, eating a radically vegetarian diet. Onions and garlic were not allowed in her diet because of their impassioning properties.

Today the widow’s hidden treasury of recipes have added much value as vegetarianism gains momentum the world over.

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