Kishwar Chowdhury's Panta Bhat is a Hat-Tip to Culinary History
When Masterchef Australia contestant, Kishwar Chowdhury made panta bhat on the popular show, it started a conversation about the role of certain ‘humble’ foods. Sohel Sarkar writes about these ‘foods with the least capital’ — cold foods, and foods left out to ferment overnight — a tradition that is practiced across the length and breadth of the country.
To serve or not to serve panta bhat at a prestigious international cooking challenge? For Bangladeshi-origin Masterchef Australia contestant Kishwar Chowdhury, the answer was an unambiguous yes. At the season finale, Chowdhury wowed the Masterchef judges with a dish she called ‘Smoked Rice Water’ — inspired by the ubiquitous panta bhat of Bengal. South Asian viewers, however, seemed more torn. Some were irked by Chowdhury’s decision to showcase what they saw as a way too ‘simple’ dish. Others cheered her on, pointing out that its simplicity left little room for errors.
Food columnist Pooja Pillai attributes the “derision” of some viewers towards the humble panta bhat to what food studies scholar Krishnendu Ray calls a “global hierarchy of tastes” that “places the cuisines of more powerful groups/nations right at the top, while the food of those with the least capital (economic and socio-cultural) is at the bottom”. The modest origins of panta bhat place it squarely among foods with the so-called “least capital”. By most accounts, panta bhat started off as a rural breakfast dish. Leftover cooked rice would be soaked in water and left to ferment overnight and eaten the next day with onions, chillies, a dash of salt and mustard oil. It was a cheap and easy source of energy for farmers and kept their bodies cool in Bengal’s punishing summers. This technique also helped preserve the rice for longer where electricity and refrigerators were unavailable.
Chowdhury’s Bangladeshi origins meant her Smoked Rice Water is immediately associated with panta bhat, but the concept of fermented rice can be found across South Asia. What is panta on both sides of the Bengal border, is poita bhat in Assam, pakhala bhat (or pokhal) in Odisha, gheel bhat in Bihar, pazhaya saadham in Tamil Nadu, pazhaya kanji in Kerala, and chaddannam in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. In fact, the practice of consuming food cooked a day or two in advance and left to ferment at room temperature, has a long history in India. It is a history that extends beyond rice. Chowdhury’s elevation of a fermented (in her case, smoked) rice gruel to a Masterchef-level dish can be read as a hat-tip to this culinary history.
During my childhood, a serving of panta bhat would frequently make its way from my grandmother’s kitchen to the dinner table, especially during the punishing Kolkata summers. The more elaborate precursor to this was the annual ritual of eating gota sheddho (which translates into whole boiled) during the month of February. A medley of seasonal vegetables such baby and sweet potatoes, broad beans, shish palong (a variety of spinach), baby eggplants, and green peas, with their skin, stalks, and shells intact would be cooked whole along with whole moong dal on Saraswati Puja (celebrated as Vasant Panchami elsewhere in India). This one-pot meal was left overnight at room temperature and consumed cold the following day — observed as Shital Shashti — with panta bhat, a dash of salt, and a splash of mustard oil. Occasionally, this would be accompanied by lentil, onion, or poppy seed fritters and dry vegetable dishes, but even these were cooked the previous day. According to food writer Priyadarshini Chatterjee, the ritual of offering Shital bhog — panta bhat accompanied by khesari dal, kochu saag (taro stem), lentil fritters, fish, and an elephant apple chutney, all prepared a day in advance — to the deity Durga is still followed by some households in Bengal.
Similar eating practices are observed elsewhere in India as well. Among communities across eastern, northeastern, and southern states, fermented gruel made of rice or millet is often part of the daily diet. In north and central India, however, the practice of eating baasi (food cooked and kept overnight) is usually limited to religious observances or folk festivals, nutrition consultant and food writer Sangeeta Khanna points out. Known as Sili Saat in Uttar Pradesh, Shitala Ashtami or Basoda in Rajasthan, Shitala Satam in Gujarat, and Shila Saptami in Maharashtra, each of these festivals take place either during the spring or monsoons and have their own unique food preparations, but they all revolve around the custom of eating cold and stale food. The words Shital(a), Shila, and Sili literally translate into cold.
In Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, and Rajasthan, the spread includes dahi vada (ground lentil balls eaten with curd) , kanji vada (moong dal vadas in a fermented liquid), and bajra ka raab, writes Chatterjee in her own account of such eating rituals. Essentially, a gruel-like concoction made by tempering pearl millet flour with spices like ajwain (carom seeds), jeera, and even turmeric, a sweet version of bajra ka raab can be made with jaggery, says chef and food consultant Abhilasha Chandak. Besides raab, the basoda meal in Rajasthan has bajra ka roti (pearl millet flatbread), darab bati (puris made of lentils and whole wheat flour), dal or bedwa puri, masala bajra roti, ker sangri (made with copious amounts of oil and whole red chilli and resembles a pickle), sprouts, curds, and a sweet wheat halwa — all prepared and left overnight and consumed over the next few days, Chandak adds.
Kanji vada, Khanna points out, is also made by the khatri community in Punjab during weddings. It is cooked in “mitti ka ghara (earthen pots) and sealed and kept for 2-3 days” and eaten after till the wedding rituals are completed to counter the effects of the rich meals typical of such ceremonies. Left to sour overnight, kanji can also be consumed by itself due to its “excellent digestive qualities”. This fermented drink can be made with or without carrots and is most common in the months leading up to Holi as winter turns into spring and then summer.
In Bihar, Shitala Shashti is an occasion to eat a day-old, “stale dal puri, kheer, sattu, badiyan (dried lentil cakes) and drink the extract of a herb called chirata, which is an immunity boosting agent,” Khanna adds. Others might even make something as simple as rice and dal, cooked and left overnight. A similar simplicity marks the spread for Shila Shaptami in Maharashtra. Extra bhakris (millet rotis) are made the previous night and eaten the next day with milk or buttermilk, says author and culinary consultant Saee Koranne-Khandekar. In the rice-eating regions of the state, such as along the Konkan coast, rice is made and kept under a layer of water to keep it from spoiling and eaten as gruel the next day with a pickle and/or buttermilk, she adds.
In contrast, the ritual of eating cold food is a more elaborate affair for the Sindhi community, spread over three festivals. Gogro, Nandi Thadri, and finally, Vadhi Thadri take place within a fortnight in the month of Shrawan, between July and August. The word Thadri translates to cold while Nandi and Vadhi literally mean small and big, respectively. Typical delicacies consist of a variety of sweet and savoury flatbreads, explains Sindhi food blogger Alka Keswani. Lola is made from whole wheat, sweetened with jaggery or sugar, and flavoured with cardamom. For koki, whole wheat flour is kneaded with ghee, chopped onions, chillies, coriander leaves, salt, and dried pomegranate seeds. Besani is made with gram flour while dal paato is a paratha made from moong dal. Accompaniments include dry vegetables such as stuffed bitter gourd, okra, potatoes etc. and some households also make mirchi pakora (stuffed chilli fritter) and dahi vada. The Thadri spread also includes kanbho or khatto bhat, boiled and cooled rice mixed with milk, curd, and mustard powder and left to ferment overnight, Keswani adds. It is eaten the next day with fresh curd and more mustard powder.
Thadri spread | Image credit Alka Keswani
In most states, these eating rituals are also grounded in folklore associated with the deity Shitala (the word literally translates into ‘the one who cools’), worshipped as the one who cures pox, measles, and other potentially fatal fevers. Before vaccinations became widespread, chicken pox was especially common during spring. The “fever’s shakes” were believed to “symbolise that Shitala had entered the patient’s body. The patient would then become Shitala and be propitiated with cold, stale edibles, including cold water or infusions, vegetarian and non-vegetarian food,” columnist Bibek Bhattacharya writes. In rural Bengal, stale food is also eaten during the monsoons to appease the snake goddess Manasa. As the monsoon rains bring snakes out of their burrows and into people’s homes, Manasa is invoked to protect people from snake bites by leaving the hearth unlit for a day and eating the previous day’s fare. In Sindhi folklore, the snake goddess is replaced by a snake god, Gogul, worshipped during Gogro (Nag Panchami elsewhere in India).
Folklore aside, these foods have a nutritional rationale. Seasonal transitions often weaken immunity and make the body prone to diseases and infections. Eating overnight stale food, kept at room temperature, without reheating is “a great way to introduce the body to the coming season’s probiotic as well as pathogenic microbes”. This is what Koranne-Khandekar calls a “transition diet”, making people mindful of the foods they should consume to prepare the body for the coming season. As winter turns into spring, the slowly rising temperatures mean slow fermentation and, therefore, probiotics which are good for gut health. “The probiotic bacteria help build good immunity, boosting gut flora, and the inoculation with pathogenic bacteria in small numbers prepares the immune system for seasonal illnesses by switching on the Immunoglobulin M protein, a basic antibody, as the first immune response,” Khanna explains.
Fermentation makes certain cereal grains such as rice more digestible. The breakdown of a nutritional inhibitor in cooked rice by lactic acid bacteria, after as little as three hours of fermentation, increases its mineral content manifold, according to Madhumita Barooah, an Associate Professor in the Assam Agricultural University. Some of these foods, such flatbreads cooked in copious amounts of ghee, have a “good shelf life” and can be left at room temperature for longer. They are eaten with curds and pickles, again probiotics, Keswani says. These foods are not about cooling the body per se, but building immunity by releasing digestive enzymes.
Despite their nutritional value, the practice of consuming fermented food, especially in the form of elaborate meals, appears to be dwindling. The custom of eating gota sheddho that was an annual affair during my grandmother’s generation, had become a one-off indulgence during my childhood. Part of the reason may be that cooking these spreads is a laborious undertaking, disproportionately performed by women in the family. They are also time-consuming, often demanding an entire day’s work. Khanna, however, expects this culinary practice to be reinvented in other ways over time. “Lacto-fermentation has become a trend all over the world,” she says. “Now after the pandemic, interest in and experiments with lacto-fermentation has become something of a worldwide phenomenon. So it is bound to come back.” She herself has included kanji and kanji vada in the hotel menus she has designed. Michelin-star restaurants like Noma in Copenhagen make extensive use of fermentation processes, Chandak points out.
Panta bhat by the Insomniac Cook
Others are less sanguine. While there is a general awareness of concepts like probiotics and fermented foods, there seems to be an aspirational value attached to them, Koranne-Khandekar points out. “We will pay a bomb to buy a bottle of Kombucha but not eat curd rice made using last night's leftover rice.” She takes heart from the work of chefs like Rahul Akerkar of Qualia and Anumitra Ghosh Dastidar of Edible Archives who, she says, approach fermentation “in fun ways that also draw from traditional food wisdom”.
It is worth noting that many of these elaborate festival-linked spreads are primarily, though not entirely, the forte of upper-caste communities who are also economically well off. The wide array of ingredients, copious quantities of ghee, and seasonal vegetables that are mandatory parts of these eating rituals place them out of the reach of many. In contrast, fermented gruels like panta bhat, that Chowdhury chose to showcase, and its various regional iterations centre the culinary histories of those who remain lower down on the socio-economic hierarchy due to systemic discrimination. While tapping into this specific history of fermented foods, Chowdhury has also unsettled the aspirational “hierarchy of tastes”, skipping the more exotic Kombucha to reach for the no-frills curd rice. Or in her case, the panta bhat.
Banner image credit Alka Keswani
Sohel Sarkar is a freelance journalist, editor, and feminist researcher-writer. Her cultural critiques, reviews, and personal essays have appeared in Bitch Media, Himal Southasian, Whetstone Magazine, and Color Bloq, among others. Find her on Twitter here.
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