Starting with the bitters, ending with the sweet.

Try them!

I started with the bitters today.

The gnarly, near unpalatable, dreaded green of the bitter gourd or the ‘ucche’.

It’s an acquired taste, the bitters. I always wondered why Bengali meals began with it.

Living in Delhi’s heart of Bengali-land, Chitaranjan Park for over three months now, I have had my fill of butter chicken, paneer and butter laden ‘aloo parathas’. Of course, I did get around to sampling the fare from the localities’ several ‘Bengali’ restaurants and take-aways. To every aficionado who would zealously advocate this fare, I would say, it ain’t the real thing; especially the non-vegetarian, which is well, much like Delhi-Chinese, the Delhified version of authentic Bengali grub.

Which made me venture into the kitchen myself. For a taste of home. Home, which is my inheritance, the comforting salve which I carry with me wherever I go, the memory of my grandmother and mother, garrulously toiling away over the kadhai, never running out of complaints, “When my child, will you ever learn?”

I of course, never learnt. I could never learn how to measure when it came to cooking. Things continue to be flung in at random. This of course makes the Man Friday, the guest-house keeper here jump out of his skin to see the amount of chillies I flung into the pan every time. Perhaps in fear of indigestion, curiosity or general well-being that I not burn down the house, he stands in vigil, as I cook amidst the fumes.

“This is burning,” he says. No, it is not, let it cook. “Are you sure about this?” he adds suspiciously and I tell him ever so gently, you really don’t have to eat this you know. Which works; well, for the time being.

So after the fish and the meat over past weekends, I came upon the bitters today.

They can be overcome, the bitters, with tempering.

“Why does Bengali food have to be sweet?” I’m asked ever so often. Most people not accustomed to the taste, cringe a little to spot the sweet taste in the dishes, sweet – something often reserved only for the last course, dessert.  

It’s all in the balance.

Sour, pungent or bitter, everything can be overcome, tempered, countered with its opposite taste. It is an inheritance, the kitchen’s chemistry of a handful spices, blending, searing, raging, bursting with their personalities, waging their own humble battle in the pan, plunged into scorching oil.

How much to extract of every flavor, how and exactly when… just like life, so in the kitchen. And it is toil. It takes patience. Time. And a little faith.

There are no masters, nor wretches who cannot go right, or wrong all the time. It is all a matter of acquired taste.

Today I broke them, the bitters. Gently seared it out of them, with the melting of starch in potatoes and acrid egg-plant. Sprinkled with swift rushes of pungent and sweet, it blended into the ever, ever so humble ‘sukto’.

Temperance, or moderation, to achieve which there are neither masters nor wretches who can inch towards it without the trying or the effort.

Life’s lessons need not always be in fancy places, high-profile meetings or boardrooms.

They begin, like you and me, in our own humble roots.

The place we must never forget, to keep forever close to heart.