This is Kolkata where you can breakfast at the para’r cha’er dokan or breakfast at home. You can breakfast on kochuri and chhola’r dal or go full English. Or, Chinese. Or, South Indian. You can breakfast sitting down or have it standing in a corner of a busy joint. You can breakfast in silence or join an adda. In Kolkata, breakfast as you wont to breakfast but end it with mishti. A rosogolla or some rabdi. Maybe a plate of gorom mihidana. And tea. More cups of tea.
KOLKATA / INDIA
Your days start with cha. Not chai. Not tea. But cha. Bhanr’er cha. Tea served in a bhanr, a small clay pot. The chawala pours the mud brown concoction of milk, sugar, and tea leaves from a blackened kettle into a bhanr. You pay anywhere between 5 and 15 rupees, and extra if you unscrew any of the glass jars and take a biscuit. Sometimes you eat it and sometimes you feed it to the stray dogs that are almost always there, everywhere in these lanes. Huddled around the tea stall with a motley crowd, you blow on your cha to cool it, then sip noisily. The latest gossip is shared over the morning newspaper. You often find yourself eavesdropping and if you’re feeling brave, you’ll slip your opinion into a random conversation. Sometimes it’s one round of tea, sometimes more before you have to rush to work. Sometimes it’s Sunday morning and you’ve to hurry to the fish market for the freshest chingri or katla.
You hail a rickshaw but stop on the way at the kochuri’r dokan and breakfast on a helping of kochuri and chholar dal. The para’r dokan make the best, really, the kochuris soft and fluffy, stuffed with dal or koraishuti. The green pea ones are almost always made in the winter. The season of nolen gur and plum cakes. When the nights are long and the singaras come stuffed with spiced fulkopi. Soon you are outside the jam-packed store front, change in hand, ordering a plate of kochuri. “Dada, ekhane duto,” you holler. In the cacophony of passers-by, the honking smoke-belching buses, the tring-tring of bicycles, you scoop the thick, aromatic, hing-laced chholar dal — sweet and savoury with bits of coconut– with a broken boat of a kochuri, then with another, and another till you have polished the plate and promised yourself that next morning you’ll order the alu’r torkari with kochuri for breakfast. “Ah! alu,” you mumble as your tongue remembers those spicy morsels of boiled potatoes and yellow peas in gravy.
TIP: Sri Hari Mistanna Bhandar in Bhawanipur, Putiram on College Street, and Sen Mahasay in Shyambazar for the dalpuri. Check Indrajit da’s post for some lesser-known kochuri joints.
On Sunday, when you return from the market, your maa serves luchi and sada alu’r chorchori. Luchi isn’t poori. You have said this again and again and again to your non-Bengali friends. Luchi is softer, more delicate. Pillowy white moons. And the delicate sada alur chorchori, spiced only with kalo jeere and kancha lonka, is epic. And sometimes it’s your third breakfast of the day, having already polished a plate of kochuri and then another of dim toast. On some weekends, persistent texts wake you up. Your friend in the next lane wants you to join him at Niranjan Agar. It’s a request you can never turn down. So you brush your teeth and set out in your pyjamas. Sleepy-haired and dreaming of dim poach.
On some mornings, your baba gets singara and jilipi to go with the cha and you all sit on the cool, red floor. The cats come and cuddle at your feet. The rustle of newspaper. The sizzle of torka in the neighbour’s kitchen. Strains of a harmonium. The three of you talk and talk and talk until your maa remembers she has chores to complete and reprimands the two of you for wasting her time. Maa always has chores to complete. In the dalan, the light is golden like caramel. As if it is spring and the krishnachuras have just begun to bloom.
As the bus passes by Shyambazar’s five-point crossing, you reminisce our many breakfast dates. At National Economic, over cups of lebu cha and buttered toast and eggs, we had dreamt and re-dreamt a future together. You like your toasts sprinkled with sugar; I like them with salt and pepper. And you’d show me how to eat a dim poach. Mop up the runny yolk with bread, of course! “Where can I get a loaf of this,” I’d ask. Chewy and rustic. Not bland or artificially smooth. Cut into thick slices. Just how you prefer your bread. Near National Economic, there’s a shop that serves kochuri on banana leaves. Adi Haridas Modak. You text me and say that we should go there for breakfast sometime. And, also, to Tiretti Bazaar where you had been, one morning, years before we had met.
Also read: For a true taste of old Calcutta, explore Shyambazar with our Neighbourhood Guides: Shyambazar.
You had to start at the crack of dawn. Walking at that hour through the narrow lanes of Central Avenue was surreal. The mansions were asleep and so were the shops and the porters sleeping on their hand carts. None of the bustle, the sweltering heat. Even the bathers hadn’t arrived to squat under the overflowing spouts of tidal water. These were the pre-mobile phone days when exploring the gullies of North Calcutta was an adventure, a lesson in getting lost and finding yourself. The sky was quiet. Brooding, if you will. As if someone had smoothened the hard edges of this part of the city overnight. The soot-darkened walls, the stinking trash, the rebellious chatter of crows all appeared mellow. And then suddenly, as if you had stepped through a portal, you were in Tiretta Bazaar where descendants of Chinese immigrants had set up stalls selling baos, dumplings, sausages, and soups. And thus, began that edition of breakfast in Kolkata: burning your tongue on a spoonful of piping hot, peppery fish ball soup. When you started for home a little over an hour later, you had had your fill of chicken sui mai, pork buns, and five-spice laced pork belly.
And another morning, on a slow tram ride, you arrived in Dalhousie. Office-para, it is called. Long before you had to go to the office, of course! These days you feel too tired to go exploring on the weekends. Your friend in the next lane has moved out of the city, so you breakfast at Niranjan Agar all alone or walk to Lokkhi Narayan Shaw and Sons for singara. That morning in Dalhousie, breakfast was malai toast and a cup of tea. You are lactose intolerant but, as you often say, you were feeling brave that day. The charcoal-toasted bread came topped with thick, silky malai. Not so sweet but melt in the mouth. Different, you thought. Somehow it reminded you of the daab’er saash at the bottom of the glass of daab shorbot at Paramount. Fleshy yet silky. Fragrant. Elusive. So, you order a daab from the seller on the footpath and drink from it. This was in the pre-straw era when the norm was to take the bajaar’er bag to go grocery shopping and the maach’er bag to get fish because the greengrocers and the fishmongers and the butchers, nobody had plastic bags and dry goods came in a kagoj’er thonga. Once one of my classmates got the shock of her life when the muriwala outside our school gave her jhaal muri in a thonga made of an old answer script! She swore it was her handwriting on it!
I cannot remember when single-use plastic bags and plastic bottles and straws became all the rage. Baba always carried cloth bags to the market for vegetables. For meat and fish, it was a colourful polymer bag that he soaped and washed after the shopping trip. Soft drinks came in glass bottles. Grains, rice, tea, and everything dry came in paper bags that were upcycled from newspaper and notebooks. You had to carry a plastic egg carrier to buy eggs. Milk didn’t come in plastic pouches. The milkman would pour the milk from a large steel contraption into whatever vessel you provided. And neither did doi or roshogolla; they came in earthen bhanrs. Nobody sold fuchka’r jol in plastic bags; if you wanted to bring some home, you had to carry your own bowl or tiffin box. Same for takeaways of all kinds. Milton water bottles were a must for trips! Everybody had their own. We were being sustainable without knowing it. When did we stop? Why did we stop?
Also read: Find out more about the city’s gastronomy in Kolkata for Foodies.
On some mornings, breakfast means muri. In a large steel bowl, you place a few handfuls of fluffy, white muri. Then maa ladles some of last night’s niramish torkari on top of it. You seat crossed-legged on the chowki in the dalan, the cats meowing here and there, and eat with a spoon. Somewhere someone is dictating a grocery list. A child is reciting multiplication tables. Leftover torkari is always tastier, the spices having unfurled their deepest secrets overnight. Baba comes with his bowl of dudh muri sweetened with batasha and you both sit in silence, munching. He isn’t much of a talker but sometimes when you ask, he tells you about his city’s secrets: little-known food joints, houses with teak staircases and Scottish ironwork, quaint lanes, and stories of eating hing kochuri and ghugni for breakfast in Kolkata.
You are a North Calcuttan through and through. Your mornings revolve around the para’r kochuri’r dokan and the cha’er dokan but some mornings, suddenly eager to eat healthy, you brew a cup of Darjeeling. Full-bodied and red. As you stand on the balcony sipping from an old porcelain cup that your maa had bought at a fair, you are transported to the wooded hills in the north. Deep inside, you know your commitment to the cup of Darjeeling tea isn’t permanent; you know you’ll return to the cha‘er dokan for the banter and the bitching. To be witness to the city, its multitudes of stories congregating, then dispersing at every hour. Perhaps you’ll ask the chawala to go easy on the sugar?
TIP: To try Darjeeling teas, head to The Tea Place by Manjushree in Hindustan Park, Dolly’s Tea Shop inside the Dakshinapan Shopping Complex in Gariahat, Cha Bar on Park Street, or the Whistling Kettle in Gariahat.
Sometimes you take the metro to the south and order an English breakfast at one of the many cafes that have mushroomed along Southern Avenue and in Hindustan Park. Sausages and salamis, roasted tomatoes and herbed mushrooms, toast and mashed peas, hash browns and bacon. Sometimes you order an espresso and a muffin. Or, even a glass of chilled watermelon juice. But on most days, you abandon the idea and stroll hungrily through Gariahat, either stuffing your face with kochuri or digging into a roadside masala dosa slathered with coconut chutney. Once while eating sandwiches for breakfast at Flurys, a friend told you about panta bhaat. In your ghoti household, it was a novelty so they invited you for breakfast. You weren’t quite sure what to expect when the plate of plain-looking watery rice arrived but a mouthful of it and you knew you had stumbled upon a gastronomic delight. The note you wrote in your journal later said: Panta bhaat is leftover rice soaked in water and served with a halved onion, green chilies, some kasundi, and pungent mustard oil. And sometimes, for indulgence’s sake, a fried ilish peti.
TIP: Panta bhaat is not usually served at restaurants but you can find a few bhaat’er hotel, especially outside the city, which serve it. To make panta bhaat at home, follow Bong Eats’ recipe!
You are meeting friends on College Street for breakfast. You went to school here. You know this neighbourhood like the back of your hand. The familiar bookstores, the rumbling trams, the scholars from Presidency indulging in adda and cigarettes. Mothers huddling in groups waiting to collect their wards after classes end. You go sniffing down the street, under the eaves of book stalls, filling your lungs with the scent of old editions, second-hand thrillers, and dog-eared dictionaries. Then there’s the scent of freshly pressed books: Books for entrances, books for exams, textbooks. It’s not your favorite, so you hurry to the next stall where pillars of old National Geographic magazines loom over you and forgotten editions of Shakespeare and Keats bask in the morning sunlight. And soon you are being greeted by friends at Putiram. Over chholar dal, alu’r dom, and kochuri, you relive your boyhood days. Then order a few sondesh before tracing your steps towards Coffee House but someone decides to take the shortcut through College Square where the morning swimming lessons have just finished and the men at the YMCA canteen are dishing out, as quickly as they can, bowls of chicken stew. The inviting aroma of chicken and pepper is too hard to say no to, so you order a plate and sit swinging your legs on a low wall. After the carrots, beans, and chicken is gone, you mop up the jus with a slice of bread. Then, together you go traipsing over to the Indian Coffee House, where over black coffee and vegetable cutlets and sandwiches, there will be adda.
Also read: How about going on a College Street Food Walk?
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