Locomotoring

Whenever I am home in Kolkata, I invariably find myself setting my spoon and fork aside to eat with my fingers. Invariably, my fingers get stained with turmeric. The staining used to bother me, but it doesn’t anymore. Turmeric is a force of nature, it will stain anything and everything and I am now old enough to admit graceful defeat.

I am convinced that Bengali cuisine is meant to be consumed with one’s fingers. Let me attempt to illustrate with a few examples.

Today mom served a mustard oil based pickle made from kul or jujube (link). The only way to eat it right is to smash the pickled kul with rice to release the sourness and separate the pit. The berry is small enough that attempting to smash with back of a fork is simply ineffective, the pulp is not fully released and the rice is not uniformly flavored with the plummy sourness. Another example is “jinghe posto” or ridge gourd in poppy seed sauce (link). The poppy seed sauce is creamy, the ridge gourd is soft but not falling apart. For perfect consistency, I love smashing the potatoes in my rice, without smashing the gourd. Again, doing this fine grained smashing, requires dexterity of fingers. Another example is “potoler khosha bata” or pointed gourd skin paste where the skin of the pointed gourd is made into a paste with shredded coconut, then fried in mustard oil and mixed with mustard paste. This pungent and rich paste is smashed thoroughly with rice to generate a potato mash like consistency, again something you can only acheive with either your fingers or a potato masher. Yet another example is “macher muri ghonto“, where the fish head are fried in mustard oil until they crumble and then added to a pulao like concoction of potatoes and rice. Here, the rice is pre-mixed but fish head bones are thoroughly mixed in as well, so you have to gently pull out the fish bones from your mouth with your fingers.

Were the examples helpful?

Having grown up in a Bengali household that loved traditional meals, I always ate with my fingers. I used to find eating with my hands much easier for proprioception, as a teen, I would always have my eyes glued to a book while eating. I rarely eat with my fingers anymore. Most of my meals are soups, and salads. But here in Kolkata, in my mother’s home, I eat with my fingers with ease. Eating with one’s fingers must be like riding a bike, once learned never forgotten. However, I do suspect that learning to eat with your fingers as an adult is perhaps as hard as learning to ride a bike as an adult. First, there is the technique, food rarely makes it way above the intermediate phalanges. Then, there are a number of conventions (link).

I now wonder if asian cuisines taste different when eaten with chopsticks as opposed to when eaten with fork!