Bengali food encompasses the rich assortment of foods eaten in West Bengal in India and Bangladesh. The neighboring states of Assam, Orissa and Tripura have also borrowed richly from the cuisine of Bengal, a cuisine which consists of highly diversified foods that include rice and fish as the staples and meats, lentils and chhana (cottage cheese) based sweets as the other significant inclusions. Popular Bengali food preparations include Shorshe Ilish (Hilsa fish cooked in mustard gravy), Alu Posto (potatoes cooked in a processed poppy seed base) Bhaja (fries), Roshogolla (chhana based spongy, round and white sweets soaked in syrup) and Jhal-Muŗi (spicy puffed rice snack).
Bengali food has evolved out of several historical culinary cultures. It has inherited the culinary styles of the Nawabs, the Europeans, Baghdadi Jews and several Indian as well as foreign religious cultures. This is mainly due to the powerful trade relations of West Bengal with some of the most prominent nations of those times in the world. During the 13th century, i.e. the period of Muslim power in Bengal, it is believed that Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, the exiled erstwhile Nawab of Avadh was accompanied by a large number of cooks and spice mixing experts called masalchis who post the Nawab's lifetime, dissolved with the local population, taking to occupations such as running food carts and eateries in Bengal. There was also an influx of different other foreign migrants into the state including the Afghans, the Chinese and the Jewish. Baking, cake making and tea ritual were the impacts of the British rule between the 18th and 20th centuries as well as the Jewish culture. People of Marwari background engaged in the Bengal's world famous thriving sweetmeat industry. The partition of Bengal into West Bengal and East Bengal (now Bangladesh) introduced significant differences in the preparations of the two regions as the latter is a region dominated by the Muslim culture which has influenced the region's food with the Muslim culinary culture.
Bengali food preparations make use of fish, a lot of vegetables, dairy products and spices alongside rice. The fish comes in many varieties including rohu or rui. The catfish varieties include shingi, tangra, magur, butter fish and koi. Fishes like pabda, Ilish, chitol are popular both in Bangladesh and West Bengal. Seafood like pomfret, chingri (prawns, shrimps and lobsters) and kankra (crabs) are also much preferred. Dairy products such as chhana (cottage cheese), milk and yogurt are exclusively used in the Bengali cuisine to make sweets and confectionaries such as roshogolla and pantuva. Spices and spice mixtures used in fish, rice and vegetable preparations include holud (turmeric), kalo jeere (black cumin), dhone (coriander seeds), jeere (cumin), methi (fenugreek), mouri (saunf) and shorshe (black mustard seeds). Shorsher tel or mustard oil is widely used in Bengal for frying, cooking and roasting fishes and vegetables.
Bengali Meal Routine
Book Reference for Further Reading
Bangla Ranna: An Introduction to Bengali Cuisine by S. Banerjee