Why Bengali Winter Jolkhabar is Incomplete without Peas Chops

Why Bengali Winter Jolkhabar is Incomplete without Peas Chops

The Bengali love for tea time snacks is no secret. The mere sight of a deep fried snack and a cup of Darjeeling tea, is enough to create a tizzy. But Koraishutir or peas chops hold a special place in the culinary repertoire of the state.

Friday evenings, for over a decade, were reserved for aakar kaku, my happy-go-lucky art teacher who would come home to teach us. Under his supervision, I would refine my pencil work and shading technique. My mother would bring homemade snacks along with cha (tea) to the library where he tutored me — because no guest leaves hungry from a Bengali household. The menu changed every week: caramel custard, piyaji (onion fritters), chirer (flattened rice) pulao, chicken cutlets, koraishutir (peas) chop, and the list goes on. But I will never forget the first time kaku tasted mum’s homemade, fresh-from-the-kora (kadhai) koraishutir chop, one winter evening. His eyes widened in amazement; his lips curved into a smile and he let out an appreciative groan. “Erokom chop toh konodin khaini (I’ve never eaten a chop like this before),” he said, taking another bite, fried breadcrumbs speckling his long beard.

If you’ve ever eaten a peas chop from a roadside shop in Kolkata, no matter how famed or nameless, you’ll know the insides are rather paste-like. Peas are pureed in an electric ‘mixie’ (that have replaced the upper body work out that is the traditional sil-nora), then slow cooked in a massive kora with ginger, garlic and spices, and stuffed inside potato casings, breaded and, finally, deep fried to the point of no return. Cut one in half and its glorious green stares back at you. (It remains a mystery why Peas Chop Green is not on the Pantone colour chart yet).

Every household guards its secrets in the kitchen, honed with care over generations, practised to make an ordinary ingredient extraordinary. Take for example a spicy green chilli. “We used to gorge on a kancha longkar dalna (green chilli curry) at my mamar bari (uncle’s house). I can’t even begin to describe how exquisite it was,” my aunt, Sukanya Guha says with a sigh. “No onions or garlic are used, just a basic tempering with chillies — but the flavour was so deep, and never spicy.” Another aunt, Shukla Sarbadhikari explained, “Winters meant pithe (a stuffed sweet treat in Eastern India), but the joy was in seasonal stuffings like rangalu (sweet potato) or koraishuti. Tea time in the winter, was heavenly: seasonal vegetables mashed, or dipped in batter, or coated with crumbs, or simply deep fried to a crisp. All about highlighting what is in season!”

Many of the seasonal vegetables that Bengali households celebrate were originally never cultivated in the subcontinent. Peas came from Western Asia to the Indus Valley in the fourth millennium BCE, and was later adopted by the northern part of India as part of the two-season cropping system, says Colleen Taylor Sen in Feasts and Fasts: A History of Food in India. Potatoes, the most commonly-consumed vegetable in India and without which Bengali food would be incomplete, were introduced by the Portuguese in the 16th century along with tomatoes, sweet potatoes, chilies, and a large variety of fruits and nuts, when the first European powerhouse established settlements along the Hooghly River after receiving a charter from Akbar (1580). The influence of the Portuguese, followed by the Dutch, French, and later British, on Bengali food has become so intertwined with its heritage, that one often doesn’t realise it.

Before colonization, Bengali cuisine’s staple ingredient was rice with locally sourced, indigenous vegetables, and fish. The consumption of lentils was first mentioned in texts in the 15th century and even today, it is sourced majorly from outside the state. Caste restrictions played a big part in who could consume what ingredient and when. For example, Brahmins consumed fish in Bengal, depending on the variety and season, while in other parts of India, they remained strict vegetarians. Spices most commonly used were mustard, turmeric, ginger and poppy seeds, but as the spice traders and the Portuguese opened up possibilities with ingredients and cooking techniques, Bengali cuisine quickly evolved. For example, a traditional Sunday breakfast at a Bengali household includes luchi (puffed white flour bread, that could be influenced by the legacy of Portuguese bakers in the region), chholar dal (chana dal which is majorly sourced from Central India) and shaada alu torkari (white potato curry): assimilation at its finest.

The British, under the umbrella of the East India Company, formed a settlement called Fort William in Bengal, to aid trade in 1696. The Company slowly gained political and economic powers over the following two centuries. 1857 proved to be a turning point, when the Mughal dynasty ended and India’s governing policies were transferred to the British Crown. Calcutta (the name officially changed to Kolkata in 2001) became the capital of British India till 1911.

It was the rise of the middle class under British India that changed Bengali gastronomic taste and consumption patterns, often defining their existential identity. Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, in his satirical essay titled Prachina O Nabina (1879), noted certain changes in the rise of middle class Bengalis, namely the need and want of refinement in all aspects of life. With regard to Bengali cuisine, the refinement of taste led to various writers during that period advocating the need to keep the cuisine emphatically regional to save it from commercialisation; to maintain Bengali domesticity because it was usually the women of the house who cooked; and ways to go about making ‘foreign’ products taste indigenous without ruffling orthodox feathers. 

Soon, Bengali cuisine began to adapt to a ‘hybrid’ model (the use of regional ingredients and foreign modes of cooking) with late 19th century and early 20th century cookbooks, periodicals and journals frequently featuring Bengali recipes that co-existed with ‘new’ foods that had British, French, and even Jewish influences such as chops, cutlets and puddings. Sometimes, the middle class changed food names to make them more Bengali. For example, Sukumar Sen mentions how the French omelette became the Bengali ‘mamlet’. And it wasn’t just literature; restaurants sprang up in Calcutta serving ‘hybrid’ and ‘new’ delicacies where different classes of people dined, away from the rigid rules of food at home, changing forever the eating patterns of Bengalis. Rwitendranath observes in Mudir Dokan (1901), ‘Just as the Europeans are adapting our rice these days, European food like chops and cutlets have been domesticated (gharoa) amongst us.’ However, this didn’t mean Bengali middle class society wasn’t criticised. Rabindranath Tagore’s story Karmafal (1903) described how blindly aping European etiquette led to the protagonist’s downfall.

The Bengali love for tea time snacks is no secret. The mere sight of a deep fried snack or tele bhaja (literally translated to ‘fried in oil’), and a cup of Darjeeling tea, is enough to send us into a tizzy.

In the 17th century, green tea was imported by the Company from China. Unfortunately, transportation came with heavy costs, until they found tea growing wild in the northeast regions of India. The Company used Chinese growing and harvesting techniques to launch India’s tea industry in Assam. Cultivation spread across the subcontinent, like Darjeeling and the Nilgiris, where the atmosphere and soil suited production. This effectively brought down costs in England, and tea- drinking became accessible to the masses.  In India, tea began to be consumed as part of a colonial-influenced afternoon tea-time ritual, among the anglicized middle class, and also by the lowest rung on the social ladder, as attested by numerous novels of that period.

Today, Kolkata still remains one of the most anglicised cities in India. Bengalis take their food very seriously and spend a large portion of their disposable income on it. The institution of afternoon tea is incomplete without finger foods, like sandwiches and fried snacks. A chop remains essential among Bengali jolkhabar (tea time snacks). It is the Bengali equivalent of croquettes, influenced strongly by British and Anglo-Indian minced chops, and its filling can range from meats to mocha (banana blossom), and everything in-between.

Despite such varied influences, Bengali food historically followed the strict concept of niraamish (vegetarian) and aamish (non-vegetarian), especially for widows. Widows, in the patriarchal tradition, had to observe various fasts (like Ekadoshi which came very fortnight) and rituals, and their cuisine significantly lacked nutrition. Their food couldn’t include lentils or par boiled rice because they were considered aamish, against the socially sanctioned life of celibacy.

My mother, Mahua Chaudhuri, recalled her own grandmother and other elderly women of the household strictly following these cruel and regressive rules. Vegetarian cooking would reflect strict societal niraamish norms—no onions, no garlic among a host of other then-significant no-nos because “such were the intrinsic beliefs. However, they cooked dishes they had learnt from their mothers and grandmothers, from an almost parallel cuisine, right on the fringes, that most women of Bengali households followed,” she said.

A life revolving around fasting, looking after the household, eating foods with lesser nutritional values, and eating only after the men have eaten, and a host of other restrictions led Bengali women to create complex, cost-effective vegetarian flavours based on seasonal availability. They creatively used easily-available greens, vegetable skins and stems, and paste dumplings without wastage. Baatas (pastes made of leaves, peels, seeds, etc.) are as popular today as it was historically. These vegetarian dishes are the hallmark of Bengali cuisine today. It should be noted that while some cookbooks of the 19th century mention many of these simple vegetarian dishes (Pragyasundari Devi’s Amish O Niramish Ahar published in the early 1900s), the very successful Paak Pranaali by Bipradas Mukhopadhyay (1889) makes no mention of this parallel cuisine. Is it possible he wasn’t aware of such a cuisine, or did he deem such dishes unworthy of being recorded?

It could have been keen experimentation, or a knowing break from tradition that led Shukla’s mother-in-law to create a tea-time snack that found favour with every person who has tasted it; a recipe that has become an edible heirloom, passed down and shared among the women in the family.

It was sometime in the early 1950s, when Sabita Sarbadhikari one winter day, made culinary history. “She was extremely creative. I remember eating ma’s koraishutir chop so many times,” said her daughter, Sunita Datta, with a smile, when pressed for more information. Daughter-in-law, Shukla, nodded in agreement. Winters in Calcutta meant every home chef got their pea game on. Used as stuffing, in curries, or boiled with salt and butter for Continental dinners, peas were aplenty. In her North Kolkata bonedi bari (traditional house) kitchen, Sabita shelled and boiled a huge batch of peas. Then, instead of mashing them as usual, she only squished a tiny bit, less than one-fourth of the total. Then, breaking away from still-followed vegetarian norms, she chopped onions, enough to bring tears to her eyes. Slow cooked till they achieved a reddish-brown caramelisation, Sabita mixed in the whole and squished peas with a secret ratio of freshly-roasted spices. (Every household has a secret spice mix, never ask for the recipe because Rome will rise and fall again before it is divulged). She then folded small portions of sweet and spicy filling into a buttery potato casing, speckled with chopped green chillies. Then, gently dipped in whisked egg, and rolled in freshly-made breadcrumbs, the chops were fried, equally browned on all sides. Tea time that eveing was a delight. Whole peas inside a deep fried chop; sweet, tangy, spicy, and caramelised, they paired beautifully with cha.   

My mother’s father, Samarendra Nath Mitra, would often visit his married sisters in their North Kolkata homes. It was on one such visit at his older sister’s place he tasted the koraishutir chop and swooned. The recipe was shared with their mother, Sudhangshu Bala Mitra, who stayed at the ancestral house in Hooghly, a suburb of Kolkata. The chop was then regularly made every winter, as soon as fresh arrived from the market. Children of the house would race to scoop up as many fresh pods as their shirt pockets could hold, to enjoy the fresh treats, before the pea-haul was marked for cooking. The chop took on such stature that relatives would drive down to Hooghly for the weekend, to make it in time for jolkhabar.

My mother who came to South Kolkata as a doe-eyed 19-year-old, mastered Bengali, Burmese and Continental dishes with a little help from her mother, Atreyee Mitra, and mother-in-law, Roma Chaudhuri, both home chefs of formidable repute. I remember asking my mother to make the koraishutir chop one summer I was visiting Kolkata. She refused outright. Usually, she’d call the week before I arrived, to ask what I’d like to eat, like all Bengali mothers. Taken aback, I asked her best friend and cousin sister, Susree Chakraborty, the reason. “There was no concept of frozen vegetables fifty years ago. So winter time was special; our mothers and grandmothers would look forward to make the choicest seasonal dishes. If you make a unique, seasonal recipe all year long, where is the joy in that?” she said.

This last winter I was in Kolkata, drinking tea one morning when I heard the pressure cooker whistle. It is a sound so common in Bengali households that my husband, who grew up in Florida, came to associate it with weekend morning wake up calls. I waddled over to the kitchen where I saw my mother fish out boiled potatoes. A heap of boiled green peas lay in a bowl beside a mountain of chopped onions. My eyes began to water standing at the door but my mother, fearless as ever, went about heating the oil, about to start the long, tedious process of slow-cooking onions. I saw a smile on her face. She caught sight of me standing at the corner and asked, “Koraishutir chop khabi toh (will you eat the peas chop)?” I nodded with glee. I have the recipe in my notebook here in Austin where I now stay, but it is always special when my mother makes it for me. Just as her mother and grandmother used to make it for her.  

Recipe: Koraishutir Chop 

Ingredients
500 g freshly-boiled peas
1 kg chopped onions
1 chopped medium sized tomato
750 g boiled potatoes
2 chopped green chillies
2-3 bay leaves
2-3 dried red chilli
2-4 tablespoons cumin seeds
1-2 tablespoon coriander seeds
1-2 tablespoon whole garam masala
1 tablespoon butter
1 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
2 cups fresh breadcrumbs
Oil for cooking and deep frying 

Method
Dry roast the dried spices till fragrant. Then grind them
Slow cook the chopped onions until they are caramelised to a reddish-brown colour
Add the chopped tomato and continue slow cooking until mushy
Squish a handful of the boiled peas. Add that and the remaining whole peas into the caramelised mixture and keep cooking till the consistency is somewhat mushy-fried. Or as my mother calls it, “koshe bhaja”
Add the ground spices, mix well and let the mixture cool
Mash the boiled potatoes, add green chillies, salt and butter and divide into equal sized balls
Pat each potato ball on the palm of your hand to flatten, add a tablespoon  of the pea mixture, close it up and form an oblong shape. (The amount of stuffing can vary on the size of the chop but remember there should be no empty space inside)
Whisk the eggs in a container and lay out the breadcrumbs in another
Dip each stuffed chop in the egg mixture, and then coat with breadcrumbs
In a medium hot kora, start to fry the chops in batches till deep brown in colour
Serve with a pot of hot Darjeeling tea

Sharmistha Chaudhuri is a writer from India and currently based in Austin, Texas. You can read more of her work on her website and her Instagram page.


Banner image: Rhubarbandcod

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