02/04/2019 The universe of Bengali sweets was vast even before the roshogolla arrived with the Portuguese

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The universe of Bengali sweets was vast even

before the roshogolla arrived with the Portuguese
The pillowy Bengali roshogollas are underwhelming, compared to the other
quirky, creative confections from the state.
by Priyadarshini Chatterjee
Published Nov 24, 2017 · 11:30 am Updated Nov 24, 2017 · 08:24 pm.

Wikimedia Commons

What’s common between the nutmeg-scented darbesh crammed with

raisins and khoya, the glistening orange grains of the mihidana, a
joynagarer moa and the syrup-soaked sar bhaja? For one, each of these is
an iconic Bengali sweet. More importantly, none of them is made of
chhana, the soft, pillowy substance found in many confections identified
as “Bengali sweets” by those outside Bengal, like the much fought-over
roshogolla.

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02/04/2019 The universe of Bengali sweets was vast even before the roshogolla arrived with the Portuguese

The most enduring theory about Bengal’s discovery of chhana and its
evolution into the mainstay of the region’s confectionary traces the
chhana’s origin back to the arrival of the Portuguese in Bengal around the
16th century. As celebrated food historian KT Achaya writes, the
deliberate curdling of milk is taboo in Hindu tradition. By that logic, it is
only natural that the idea of curdling milk with an acidic substance would
be introduced by seafaring foreigners, and picked up by native
confectioners only later.

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Chhana-based stars like the roshogolla or sandesh, it seems then, are the
flag-bearers of a more recently morphed identity of Bengali
confectionary.

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02/04/2019 The universe of Bengali sweets was vast even before the roshogolla arrived with the Portuguese

Joynagarer Moya. Photo credit: Biswarup Ganguly/Wikimedia Commons [Licenesd under CC BY 3.0]

Food historians like Chitrita Banerji note that chhana-based sweets were
made chiefly by professional confectioners, many of them Muslims, not
inhibited by practices of ritual purity significant to Hindu homes.
However, household kitchens of Bengal have been turning out a
fascinating assortment of sweet delicacies for ages. From a mind-boggling
range of pithe (sweet or savoury cakes – baked, steamed, fried or even
stewed in sweetened milk – mostly made of rice flour, often with stuffing
made with coconut, jaggery or sugar and legumes) to different kinds of
nadu, moa and takti or fudge, to layered or stuffed pastries dunked in
syrup and luxurious treats made of khoya and kheer (milk solids and
condensed milk) – there is a whole world of iconic Bengali sweets, where
chhana is conspicuous only by its absence.

The land of sugar

For a region that derived its ancient name – Gauda – from gur or jaggery,
a fanatical fixation with sweets seems inevitable and long-standing. As
early as the 7th century, Chinese emperor Tai-Hung purportedly sent his
men to ancient Gauda, with its thriving sugarcane plantations, to learn
the art of refining sugar.

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This explains Bengal’s age-old tradition of making sugar lumps, famously

called monda (from mondo or mound) of different kinds, like the tiny
phul batasha or larger batasha called pheni, kodma and mathh that are
often a part of ritualistic offering. Besides, simple sweets made of coconut
and molasses or sugar are likely to have been popular in ancient Bengal.
Coconut is at the heart of quite a few delectable Bengali sweets, from the
humble narkel naru (coconut laddus of a kind), narkel’er takti (coconut
and milk solids fudge) to the half-moon-shaped chandrapuli.

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Bipradas Mukhopadhyay, in his iconic book Mistanna Pak, published at

the turn of the 20th century, writes about a particular sweetmeat, a kind
of pithe or pishtaka called the manthak. The manthak – deep-fried
dumplings of dough, dunked in syrup flavoured with camphor and
cardamom – have been around since ancient times, writes
Mukhopadhyay. Unfortunately, the culinary culture of ancient Bengal has
been documented rarely, except for a few stray instances.

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Darbesh. Photo credit: Summer Ong/via Facebook.com

Sweets of yore
On the contrary, medieval Bengali literature, particularly the Mangal
Kavyas – a vast body of narrative verses written mostly in praise of folk
deities and composed by authors from various regions of Bengal over
centuries – are speckled with references to contemporaneous Bengali
kitchens and studded with delectable descriptions of home-cooked meals
that testify to Bengal’s longstanding proclivity for all things sweet.

Mukundaram Chakrabarti’s Chandimangal (a sub-genre of medieval

Bengali literature called Mangal Kavyas) is replete with accounts of sweet
dishes made of condensed milk or kheer, mitha petha or sweet cakes
made of rice flour and cooked in milk, payas or rice cooked in sweet milk,
kalabara, sesame porridge, mugsanti, khiramanna, khirpuli and gourd
cooked in milk and flavoured with fennel. In his incredible book
Anthropology of Sweetmeats, Anil Kishore Sinha mentions a few of these
as well.

Bippradas Pipillai, a 15th century poet who wrote Manasa Vijay Kabya,
another version of Manasa Mangal Kavya, mentions a variety of sweet
dishes made of everything from rice, legumes and semolina to jaggery
and milk solids like the “ashke pithe, kheer puli, dugdha chushi, mug
samli and saru chaki”.

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In her essay How the Bengalis discovered chhana and its delightful
offspring, Banerji wrote about “kheer mixed with sliced mangoes, sweet
yoghurt and items like dugdhalaklaki, sar bhaja, sar pupee and sandesh”
that were mentioned in Krishnadas Kabiraj’s Chaitanyacharitamrita.
According to her, the dugdhalaklaki was a predecessor of the present-day
rabri, but in the Bengali way, sar (a fatty cream skimmed off milk, piled in
layers and allowed to rest until firm) was cut in squares and stewed in
sweetened milk. Sar Bhaja is basically the sar deep-fried in ghee and
dunked in syrup while sar pupee or present-day sar puria is fried sar
layered with almonds and khoya, soaked in sweetened milk.

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Krishnadas Kabiraj’s Chaitanyacharitamrita, the epical biography of the

15th century religious reformer and founder of Gauda Vaishnavism, Sri
Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, is another fantastic resource of insights on the
popular food habits of the time. In fact, Nadia district, where Chaitanya
was born, specifically the city of Krishnanagar, is still famous for their sar
bhaja and sar puria.

The sandesh mentioned in Chaitanyacharitamrita, Banerji says, were

“sweetened pellets of Khoya kheer”, and not the crumbly chhana-based
sweetmeat the term is synonymous with today.

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Sweet pride
Centuries later, pithe and payas are still among the most treasured
delicacies in any Bengali home, steeped in nostalgia and sentimentality.

Like neighbouring Odisha, Bengal has a fascinating range of pithe. The

tradition of making pithe, especially on the harvest festival of Makar
Sankranti (also known as Pithe Parbon in Bengal) is not only a time-
honoured custom but also a token of domestic prosperity. From perennial
favourites like Patishapta – a thin creped stuffed with coconut, jaggery or
kheer – and Gokul pithe and dudhpuli to rare numbers with intricate
recipes, the variety is staggering.

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Mukhopadhyay lists a mindboggling variety of recipes for pithe, both

sweet and savoury, including lesser-known stars like the sar chakra, a
deep-fried pithe made with shona moong dal, coconut paste, khoya, sugar
and maida, flavoured with cardamom and dunked in rose-flavoured
syrup or one made with the pulp of palmyra fruit, flour and jaggery,

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wrapped in banana leaves and roasted in a clay over, sometimes

overnight.

Patishapta Pithe. Photo credit: Acoomar/Wikimedia Commons [Licensed under CC BY 4.0]

Again, few Bengalis could resist a bowl of thick, creamy chaal’er payesh
(runny rice pudding), especially if infused with fragrant nolen gur (date
palm jaggery). Referred to as Paramanna (literally, best rice), it is rice
cooked in milk, usually with ghee and jaggery. In ancient texts, payesh is
an offering and a component of ritualistic spreads.

But in Bengal payesh need not be made of rice only. From semolina and
rice flakes to young bottle gourd, sweet potato and jackfruit seeds, and
even luchi or deep-fried bread, stewed in sweetened, luscious reduced
milk, the Bengali repertoire of payesh reflects the regions almost quirky
culinary imagination.

Orbs of sweetness

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02/04/2019 The universe of Bengali sweets was vast even before the roshogolla arrived with the Portuguese

Like pithe and patishapta, which have only recently started making an
appearance on the shelves of sweet shops, quite a few other Bengali
sweets have for the longest time, remained a specialty in household
kitchens – culinary heirlooms passed down through generations.

Sar Bhaja. Photo credit: Biswarup Ganguly/Wikimedia Commons [Licensed under CC BY 3.0]

Take for instance the naru. While the naru made with coconut and
jaggery or sugar is the most common version, it has a myriad other
avatars – chholar dal’er naru, til’er (sesame) naru, sujir (semolina) naru
and many more.

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An especially unique one is the ananda naru, prepared exclusively during

auspicious occasions like weddings. Made of rice flour, coconut and
jaggery, these narus are fried in pungent mustard oil and often come
studded with sesame seeds. Of course, every household has its own recipe
and even ritualistic stipulations, for making the ananda naru.

A close cousin of the naru is the moa, usually made of puffed, flaked or
popped rice and jaggery. A particularly special case is the joynagarer
moa, the crumbly, cardamom-scented sweetmeat made with nolen gur
and khoi (puffed rice). Made exclusively of Kanakchur rice, and peculiar
to the eponymous Joynagar, a town in Bengal’s South 24 Parganas, it
earned the GI tag a couple of years ago.

Narkel Naru. Photo credit: Sharad Utsav Kolkata/via Facebook.com

A discussion on Bengali sweets seems incomplete without the mention of

the mihidana, which literally translates to fine grains. The mihidana was
born almost four decades after the roshogolla, in Burdwan. Purportedly,
it was Bhairav Chandra Nag, a local sweet-maker, who made mihidana
and sitabhog to mark Lord Curzon’s 1904 visit to Burdwan to confer the
title of Maharaja on Vijay Chandra, the then king of Burdwan. While

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sitabhog uses a mix of chhana and rice flour, the original recipe of
saffron-tinted mihidana calls for three different varieties of rice –
kaminibhog, gobindobhog and basmati – powdered and mixed with
Bengal gram flour, to form the batter. Laced with ghee, fragrant and
delicate, the mihidana in its time was perhaps the most worthy
declination of the chhana craze.

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Roshogolla Bengal Geographical Indication Bengali Sweets Rasgulla Food

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