What Does Your Home Taste Like?
My earliest and most enduring memory of a meal is from my late maternal grandmother's kitchen in small-town Assam, young enough to not remember my age.
My earliest and most enduring memory of a meal is from my late maternal grandmother's kitchen in small-town Assam, young enough to not remember my age. My cousins and I called her Didi. She was larger than life — her anger was legendary and devastating and therefore rarely deployed; her generosity was far more typically observed. I never saw the gate of their house closed – people were always dropping by unannounced for meals, conversation and company. Ours is an extended family of emigrants and refugees, many with uncertain addresses, so Didi was used to cooking for more than her family of six. While she had many dishes in her repertoire, from dal with fish heads to kochur pitha (taro root fritters), what lingers most on my tongue is her egg korma — we’d call it Didi’r dim, or grandmother’s eggs.
In hindsight, it wasn’t a complex dish: boiled and lightly seared eggs cooked in a base of onions, red chilli, turmeric and curd, with ghee-toasted cashews and raisins adding decadence. It was reserved for special occasions, yet still a far cry from the technical complexity of a classique beef bourguignon, or even the slow-cooked laboriousness of a Mughal nihari. The dish came together fairly quickly, requiring only care and timing — don’t burn the onions or spices, balance the salt and sugar. With every bite, sour, sweet and hot flavours jostled for space on your palate — the tok-jhaal-mishti quintessence of Bengali cuisine, the dry fruits adding textural contrast. My whole life, I’ve been searching for that taste again.
A Sylheti Bengali upbringing in Assam left me with lifelong identity crises — there, we’re often pejoratively called Bangladeshi; in Bangladesh, we’re Indian; and when I moved to Kolkata for college, I was considered Assamese. I was born in the fraught aftermath of the Assam Andolan, the latest in a long line of political battles over who gets to be called indigenous to the state. Even as a child, it was clear to me — home shouldn’t feel like high-stakes genealogical bureaucracy. I’ve found kinship with the immigrants of the world, the people with restless feet. And you can’t talk about immigrants without talking about food.
All culture in modernity is shaped by migration, but in cuisine those “foreign” fingerprints are particularly visible, like the Kolkata biryani with potato, beloved of Bengalis everywhere but born in the dastarkhwan of Lucknowi nawabs, or Britain’s national dish, the chicken tikka masala. Yet these foods are arguably native to their adoptive homes — you won’t find Kolkata biryani in Lucknow nor tikka masala in Delhi. Chef David Chang, in Ugly Delicious, talks about how Mexico’s tacos al pastor came from Lebanese immigrants who fled genocide in the Ottoman Empire and modified their shawarma recipes with pork and tortillas. They don’t make pork pita pockets in Turkey.
If a thing is born in a place, exists only there, and is shaped by the strange alchemy of local history and influences — is it indigenous?
Didi used to make a fish curry, chyaang maach (snakehead fish) with sorso baata (mustard seed paste), hot Assamese chillies and Naga dhania (sawtooth coriander), a spicy, dry preparation unfamiliar to Bangaal kitchens on either side of the border, but found in the cuisine of the Sylheti diaspora in the valleys of Assam. Replace any piece of it, remove it from its own specific context, and like a culinary Ship of Theseus, it ceases to be. Four years after she passed in 2009, the National Register for Citizens in Assam began, a list that would eventually render almost two million people stateless and thousands imprisoned.
What does your home taste like?
Didi didn’t leave behind any written recipes, nor was she one to actually teach you how to make something. To learn her secrets, you would sit beside her stove and observe quietly, as my mother sometimes did. She tells me about the gangajali sandesh Didi would make if there was a wedding in the neighbourhood — a delicate, now-rare Vaishnav-Bengali sweet, named for its translucent white colour, evoking the Ganga’s purity. The coconut and sugar mixture would be cooked down, new stone moulds and fresh cheesecloth used for shaping the final product — perfectly airy, melt-in-your-mouth. A peppercorn would be placed in the centre. Cooking for people is a way of loving them, of making community. I have learnt to love (and to cook) from the women in my life: my mother on the other side of the country, my partner on the other side of the world.
A while ago, I cooked for 20 friends. I made my dal, a recipe I have tinkered with for years — two parts masoor to a part each of moong and arhar, flavoured with the usual ginger-garlic, chilli, coriander and turmeric, but also axone (fermented soybean) and bhoot jolokia (ghost pepper). I made things with summer gourds and a fish kalia. And when asked why I took this on, I said I was bored. I couldn’t tell them that this is the only way I know of making a home.
The recipe for Didi’r dim has tenuously lingered in my family, so I recently made it using my mother’s notes. While it was well-received, I was dissatisfied — something was missing.
When I went home, my mother admitted she’d never been able to replicate that exact taste either. Perhaps Didi had a secret ingredient, some transcendent garam masala or ghee, that she forgot to pass on. I think it is more likely that what I am missing is the context — gathering around a table as a child with my cousins, the dappled afternoon light reflecting off my grandfather’s vegetable garden, Didi’s conspiratorial warmth as she ladled an extra half-egg on my plate. If I pass on the recipe to someone younger, to them, it will be my egg curry, not Didi’s, but I can only hope some part of that context, that joy of discovery, will remain embedded within those delicate golden yolks.
Souradeep Sengupta is a final-year PhD scholar in physics at Ashoka University. He hails from Silchar, Assam.