The Good Host | Maacher Paturi
Dip your fork into the flavors of Bengali cuisine with this special, spicy dish.
Welcome to The Good Host, the newsletter you won’t want to share.
In this week’s issue, we bring to you a wonderful recipe from the Bengali culinary tradition: Maacher Paturi, straight out of the cookbook of a Bengali radhuni (chef)! Flavored with coconut and mustard, this may well become your favorite fish-based dish in your cooking repertoire.
Bon appetit!
Parcels of Pure Delight
As a Bengali, I’ve grown up with food as a core memory. Every important moment in my life has been linked to food, one way or another. Be it a T-Shirt shaped cake, shaded in the lightest blue, for my fifth birthday, or payesh, a traditional rice and milk pudding, that is a must at every important festival or occasion. For Bengalis, everything is tied to our food.
Bengali cuisine, I think, isn’t one that comes to mind easily for those not familiar with it. Being a part of India, it often gets overshadowed by the curries and chicken tikka masalas of the world, especially considering it actually shares a deeper history with Bangladeshi food. Understandable, given that we were both, once upon a time, part of the behemoth that is Bengal. Bangla.
Our cuisine revolves around fish as its staple protein. As my mother’s numerous loving admonishments have helped me learn, the biggest litmus test of whether you are “truly” Bengali is your love for the variety of fish that are a part of the Bengali repertoire. Freshwater fish like rohu and catla (both members of the carp family) and the extremely iconic ilish or hilsa, are doled out as tests to young toddling Bengalis, as their parents help them discover the taste of the succulent fish steeped in light, fragrant curries for themselves.
Being the versatile protein that it is, there are a lot of ways to cook fish. The classic way that my family does it is by frying fillets of fish, with bones intact, in hot oil until they’re golden brown, sometimes a bit more. Then, a broth of fragrant aromatics like mustard and paanch phoron (literally meaning ‘five spices’, a melange of five aromatics) is used to flavour the fish and the accompanying vegetables. This broth also serves to flavour the rice that is most often the side to this classic fish curry, often known as maacher jhol. Today’s recipe, also from my family’s repertoire, is different.
Cooked while wrapped in banana leaves, smeared with a delicious mustard paste, the maacher paturi spells out its essence in its name. It translates, quite literally, to “fish cooked in leaves”. Fried while wrapped in little bundles, the fish cooks in the heat from the oil and the steam from the spice mix. Opening it up is like opening any present: a parcel of pure delight waiting for you.
A debate has ensued in Indian culinary forums about the similarities between maacher paturi and the Parsi dish patra-ni macchi. Both these dishes mean the same thing (in the respective languages) and the cooking techniques are near identical, with some variations in the spices used. Interestingly enough, these dishes share no lineage, each developing independently of one another, on opposite coasts of the Indian subcontinent; the former on the Eastern coasts on the Bay of Bengal, the latter on Mumbai’s shores along the Arabian Sea. However, patra-ni macchi is only cooked using pomfret fish, according to sources, while maacher paturi often uses bhetki, commonly known as barramundi.
I must say, this is an interesting (and coincidental) crossover featured in this week’s issue of The Good Host, as we bring to you my mother’s version of maacher paturi, actually made with pomfret!
Recipe of the Week 💌
Maacher Paturi
by Debarati Saha
for 4 people
Ingredients
4 whole pomfret fillets (medium size, scaled, washed, cut into 8 fillets if needed, ready for marination)
Salt, as per taste
Turmeric powder, half a teaspoon
Black mustard seeds, 2 tablespoons
One half of a fresh coconut, cut in small pieces after removing the dark brown exterior, or 4 tablespoons of desiccated coconut if fresh coconut isn’t available
Green chillies, 4 to 6 (or to taste, we like it spicy!)
Mustard oil, 3 to 4 tablespoons
4 to 6 large banana leaves
8 toothpicks or cooking twine
Process
Step 1: Marinate the pomfret with salt and turmeric powder, letting it rest for a while.
Step 2: Pulverise the coconut pieces in a food processor, bringing to a near-paste consistency, and set aside. If using desiccated coconut, use the desiccated coconut in place of the fresh coconut here.
Step 3: Combine the black mustard seeds, one green chilli, salt (as per taste) and a little water in a blender, until it forms a paste. This is the mustard paste that will bring flavour (and heat!) to the fish.
Step 4: Mix the pastes you’ve made above in equal proportions.
Step 5: Heat the banana leaves over an open flame, taking care not to burn them. This step makes them easier to fold. Tear the leaves into 8 pieces, large enough to wrap each individual fish fillet.
Step 6: Taking one of the leaves, apply a generous coating of the mustard coconut paste to the bottom. Place a marinated pomfret fillet on the paste, and apply the paste on the top as well. Place a green chili on top, and drizzle the top with half a tablespoon of mustard oil.
Wrap it up into a parcel, folding in the banana leaf over the fish on all four sides, and fasten with a toothpick or your twine.
Step 7: Now, place a wok or large frying pan on your stove, and warm it to medium heat. Brush the wok with a few drops of mustard oil, to ensure your fish parcels don’t stick.
Step 8: Once the wok is up to temperature, place your parcels inside and sauté them on a low flame, making sure to keep the wok covered at all times (the steam helps the fish to cook just right). Cook for five minutes per side, looking for a char on the banana leaf.
Once at this stage, turn off the heat and let the parcels rest in the hot wok. Let the steam and the spices work their magic on the fish, if you will.
Step 9: Open the parcels and check with a fork to see if the fish is cooked adequately.
Step 10: Serve the fish with a side of freshly steamed rice and lemon wedges as it is traditionally enjoyed. Do not eat the banana leaf, unfortunately that isn’t edible (so please don’t try)!
💡Chef’s Tip #1: This dish works equally well with other fish, such as salmon, red snapper or bhetki (barramundi).
💡Chef’s Tip #2: For the leaves, you can also use pumpkin leaves! Those are actually edible, so be sure to salt them while you are preparing the parcels. No need to heat these up, they fold quite easily.
Five Minutes with Debarati
How important is fish to Bengali cuisine?
Maacher jhol (fish curry) has been a staple for us, every day, ever since I can remember. As far as Bengalis are concerned, we are predominantly into fish, so steamed rice with maacher jhol is a staple, and that happened every day. For lunch as well as dinner. Ever since I started having rice as a child, I remember maacher jhol aar bhaat (fish curry with steamed rice).
Why did you choose maacher paturi as the recipe to share with us?
I wanted to share a dish that’s unique. Maacher jhol is a staple that we have on a regular basis, but paturi is a delicacy for us. It’s cooked on special occasions, and for our special people, our invited guests! Maacher jhol would definitely have been an easier option for one to cook, but if you can find all the ingredients needed for paturi, it isn’t that difficult. It is a very unique recipe, and I’m sure you are going to like it!
Do you have a particular memory you associate with food and cooking?
At my paternal grandparents’ home, they used to cook not with an oven, of the kind we use nowadays, but on an oonoon (a charcoal stove). The oonoon had to be prepared every time we cooked with pieces of coal, wood, and dung cakes. It would take half an hour, at the very least, to get the flame going and hot enough to cook! You might find it a bit funny, the fact that dung cakes are used as fuel, but the kind of preparations that came out of my grandmother’s kitchen were absolutely amazing. We don’t find preparations like those nowadays, simply because we cook in a normal gas oven.
I still have absolutely brilliant memories of all the things she cooked, with very limited ingredients, but they were all absolutely amazing. It’s probably a testament to her culinary skill, combined with the ingredients she used, the kind of stove she used, the utensils she cooked with; we didn’t have non-stick cookware in our households at the time. It used to be all brass utensils and iron woks. Even clay, for that matter; we used terracotta pots to make pithe (a sweet rice-based pancake). For me, the effort my grandmothers used to exert to cook delicious food, every single day, is the thing I remember the most.
To accompany the taste of Bengal, why not discover its sounds too?
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Thanks for reading and happy cooking!
Tanishk Saha,
The Good Host
Fantastic work Tanishk and Debarati!
Commendable work…Great ..keep up ❤️