Chicken curry - Bengali Style

I believe that Indians are remarkably bad at making good home-cooked Indian food popular. When you talk of "Indian" food, any paleface would think "Tandoori Chicken". The slightly adventurous one would think "saag aloo" or "saag paneer". How many would think (or even know) of a "Dhansak" or a "Hilsa in mustard"? Very few, I guess. How many would know Dhansak comes from the Parsis and Hilsa is to Bengal what caviar is to Russia? India is a large country with totally different cultures and food. Bengali cuisine is a lesser known entity but highly addictive. Seafood, freshwater fish, different kinds of greens, rice and mutton are the staples on a Bengali dining table.

The Bengal Cookbook by Minakshie Dasgupta is the best Bengali cookbook I have come across. What I like best are her descriptions with every recipe and the introductions to every chapter. Each chapter consists of recipes for every course that makes up a traditional Bengali meal. Whats more, her recipes are wonderfully accurate. I have never gone wrong following her recipes. I cook myself a Bengali meal once every month. As much as I enjoy Bengali food, my waistline and diet does not permit me the indulgence more than once.

On Monday, work was more than usually stressful and all I wanted at the end of the day was a hot curry to perk me up and fragrant steamed rice. I also craved rich Bengali food and so pulled out The Bengal Cookbook, my reliable guide to Bengali cuisine.




When I checked my refridgerator for ingredients, I found that all I had was chicken. I was hoping for shrimps, but I lost the enthusiasm to go and get them once I reached home. So, I searched for a recipe for chicken curry. I finally zeroed on this one, mostly because I had all the ingredients and because it was simple and uncomplicated to make.




The main differences between a Bengali meat curry and a North Indian one is that Bengali curries often are sweetened and add potatoes to meat. I don't find that happening in North Indian food at all. This one too required potatoes. It took me 40 minutes from beginning to end, inclusive of preparations like mincing onions and reducing the tomatoes to a paste. That is my secret to make a really smooth curry, reduce the tomatoes to a paste instead of chopping them fine.

It was a simple and standard procedure of browning minced and sliced onions, garlic and ginger paste, adding tomatoes, then the chicken and then cooking until done. The difference was in adding some sugar to the masala before adding tomatoes. I was apprehensive and added half the amount mentioned in a book and in my opinion it prevented the curry from being over-sweet. I made a huge blunder though. The recipe requires 1.5 teaspoons of red chilli powder and I added 1.5 tablespoons, wondering why it was so much. I attribute my idiot quotient to stress that day. Heh! The curry as expected was hot, really hot. This is the end result.




I had this with steamed rice and a cucumber, tomato salad. It was all I needed - hot, comforting and tasty. The chicken was cooked perfectly and despite not marinating the meat, it was succulent and full of flavour.