(If there is moisture on the surface of the mango, the pickle will spoil.) Wash the mangoes in running water and dry them completely. From Classic Indian Cooking, by Julie Sahni
Or, as Opu says, “…luchis! Luchis!” Made by “the best cook in the village” in a “huge pan, swimming with butter and filling the air with ambrosial odours of frying luchis!” Shorbojoya, the mother in the novel, places her spices “within easy reach of her right hand” when cooking-which was just how Sahni instructed me to make the dal’s spice-perfumed butter.Įither because of my love of Indian food, or because the children in the book were so desperate for yummy things to eat, I found this menu very difficult to limit, and ended up making six dishes, topping off all of the above with puffy fried poori bread, called luchis in Bengal. Even some of Pather Panchali’s cooking techniques are endorsed in Sahni’s cookbook. Seafood dishes in general are specialties of Bengal. I cook Sahni’s dals frequently, so included one for Bengali red dal, and made “velvet” shrimp and eggplant raita, since the children eat those ingredients in the novel. There was also a recipe for the mango pickle, something I would never have tried, but which turned out to be a bright, delicious dish, worth stealing mangoes for, as Durga frequently did. I found a recipe for a Bengali home-made cheese-curd dessert called ras gulla, which was like one Opu covets as an inaccessible treat for rich people. (Alas, I am not a neat cook.) Versions of almost everything the children eat in the novel can be found in Sahni’s books, which often specify the regional origins of the recipes, and include many from Bengal. Indian cuisine is one of my favorites to cook at home, and my two cookbooks from Julie Sahni are some of the grimiest and most water-warped on my shelves. On a day when Durga makes a picnic of dal, rice and eggplant snuck from her mother’s stores, Opu reflects, “To think that they were out together sitting under a date-palm tree with leaves from a custard apple tree lying like a carpet all around them, and that it was real rice and real vegetables that they were eating! How wonderful it all was!” Every bite these two take seems to be bursting with flavor, and small things like the quest for ingredients to make “a mango pickle” with oil, salt and chili become major plot points. Every path in the village is beloved to Durga, the elder sister, “she had known them all her life, so naturally and intimately that they had become a part of her…they were her own dear friends, her lifelong companions.” Though Durga and her brother Opu are often hungry, their lives are a paradise of guava and mangosteen and custard apple trees, simple but delicious dinners made by mummy, and festival treats and feasts. The great animating spirit of this beloved book is that, despite their poverty, the children’s experience is one of abundance.
It chronicles the lives of two poor children in rural India. The Bengali novel Pather Panchali, Song of the Road is best known in the West as a Satyajit Ray film but the 1929s classic is also one of the most popular titles from prolific Indian author Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay (1894–1950). In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.