From snacks to side dishes and main course: How Kolkata became the vegan capital of India

We never cook with butter and, in fact, don’t use butter in any dishes, unless, like me, you like having alu sheddho bhaat with butter. Alu sheddho bhaat is boiled potatoes mashed with rice, sometimes with ghee drizzled on top. While chhana or homemade paneer is used in a few preparations, it plays a very small role in our repertoire of delicacies.

Our vegan snacks

Vegetarian food actually makes up 80 per cent of a traditional Bengali meal, which would start with a fried vegetable, maybe some fried bitters like neem leaves or fish, followed by dal, another vegetable or two, and then, only then, would there be a fish, prawn, or mutton preparation. We do use dairy, and a lot of it, in our sweets.

Even our snacks, such as phuchka — what the pretenders tried and replicated poorly as golgappa and paani puri — are made without dairy. Or alur chop (spiced mashed potato coated in besan or gram flour and deep-fried) or Peyanji (sliced onions mixed with spices to form a patty and then deep-fried). I didn’t say it was healthy, I said it was vegan. No malai toast or paneer pakoras here.

One of the key reasons for this honour was the repertoire of vegan dishes that make up the Bengali cuisine. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

But you can have jhaal muri — puffed rice tossed with mustard oil, green chilis, chopped cucumber-onion-tomatoes, a squeeze of lime, some peanuts (if the vendor is generous), a squeeze of lime, and that secret powder mix you will never be able to replicate at home. Shingara, or what the world calls “samosa“, has nothing to do with dairy.

I can admit that Bengalis might well have replaced dairy with the humble potato, as we love adding the tuber to everything. We eat it on its own, boiled or mashed with mustard oil and chilis; we fry potato peels to a crisp and eat them with dal and rice; we julienne it and deep-fry it; and we add it to any and every vegetable preparation and meat or chicken curry possible.

The star of the Calcutta biryani is the massive potato cooked in stock.

From aloo posto to bhortas

But I digress.

It is indeed true that traditional Bengali cuisine is richer in vegan foods than most people realise. Let me introduce you to some Bengali delicacies that everyone must try.

Alu posto is potatoes cooked with poppyseed and sautéed with nigella seeds. We have a range of chutneys served at the end of a meal – plastic chutney made from green papaya, tomato chutney, and aamer chutney from green mangoes.

All our vegetable preparations are cooked in vegetable or mustard oil, and only some very rich or celebrated delicacies, like the bitter-sweet mixed vegetables, are cooked in ghee. For example, shukto has a bit of ghee drizzled over it at the end and a dash of milk. You can even make a potoler dolma stuffed with cholar dal (split peas).

Bangladeshi cuisine, in fact, has a startling array of bhortas, or mashed dishes made from vegetables — from sheem bhorta, made with flat beans, to tiler bhorta, a dish cooked with sesame seeds.

All our vegetable preparations are cooked in vegetable or mustard oil, and only some very rich or celebrated delicacies, like the bitter-sweet mixed vegetables, are cooked in ghee. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Another great dish in Bengal is spinach, and you can have a different type of sautéed greens, flavoured with just a little mustard oil and dried red chilis, every day of the week. We have at least five different shaak or green leaves that I can think of off the top of my hand: kolmi, lal, pui, kumro, shorshe, which we eat simply sautéed. No cream, no ghee, simply because that would be sacrilegious.

And this is just the tip of the delicious iceberg.

So there you have it: a galaxy of vegetable dishes that make up the majority of our diet and are untouched by milk, ghee, butter, or cream. But then we also deserve an award for specialising in cottage cheese, which makes up the majority of our sweetmeats.

If you’re vegan, though, I do think you’ll be spoilt for choice in Bengal. So if you can’t make it to Brighton, make a pitstop in Calcutta.

Next week, I’ll be writing about why the pomfret, one of the costliest fish to buy in India right now, is slowly vanishing from our plates.