Essay on favourite food in Bengali
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I don't know Bengali......
Answer:
Bengal has been famous for its food and cuisine ever since the establishment of civilization in the landscape of gluttons, made up of the sovereign state of Bangladesh (earlier East Bengal or East Pakistan) and the Indian state of West Bengal, with a total area of more than 228,000 square kilometers (Banerji 2005:xx). This landscape constitutes more than 222 million people of which Bangladesh has 141 million and West Bengal 81 million, which helped the Bengali ‘nation’ to become larger than many sovereign countries (Banerji 2005).
Traditionally, Bengal has been renowned for its extraordinarily fertile agricultural land and production of paddy. At the same time, the rivers of Bengal are an apparently inexhaustible resource of different varieties of fish. That is why, from the ancient times, rice and fish emerged as the staple food for the Bengalis. Apart from fish and rice, Bengal has had a rich tradition of many vegetarian and non-vegetarian dishes, and most of these, such as dal (lentil soup), posto (vegetables made with poppy seeds), fish curry, and mutton curry, are consumed with rice.
Nearly 5,000 years ago, paddy cultivation came to Bengal from Southeast Asia and rice became a major calorie resource of Bengali daily life (Murshid 2008:483). Paddy cultivation is practised in Bengal three times a year. Among them aman cultivation is important, when paddy is planted during monsoon and harvested in the late autumn. The next most important plantation is aush, which is planted around May-June and harvested during August-September. The boro plantation is a relatively new practice, and has been popularized with the emergence of new irrigation techniques among the Bengali farmers. This cultivation takes place during the winter and the crop is harvested in early summer.
There are ample references scattered across Bengali texts describing rice as the primary food item in Bengali diet. A government report of the 1940s shows that in order to survive, 3600 calories were required daily, and a large section of Bengali population received 3500 calories from rice itself (Banerji 2005). Besides boiled rice, different kinds of puffed rice such as muri, khoi, and flattened rice also fulfilled the daily needs of the common Bengalis. Dal has been another source of calories among the Bengali population; surprisingly it was missing in the pages of the early Bengali texts. The first Bengali texts of the 11th century, the Charyapadas, describe fishing and hunting, and mention many kinds of food crop including rice and sugarcane, but there is no reference to any kind of dal.[1] It is only in 15th-century texts, such as the Mangalkavyas, that different kinds of dal and the process of cooking are mentioned. In respect of Bengal, Chitrita Banerji (2005) notices that it had many commonalities with other Southeast Asian countries and China, where lentils and pulses were possibly unknown except soybeans (source of tofu). Even now, a major supply of lentils comes from outside the state. She also argued that the supply of fish made dal unnecessary as a source of protein. The shift occurred with the emergence of the Vaishnava Bhakti cult whose followers were vegetarian. As a result, a substitute for fish and meat had to be discovered, which is what helped to popularize dal among Bengalis (Banerji 2005: xxviii-xxix). Khichudi, a preparation of rice and dal and some spices, often offered to the deities as bhog, is also a significant dish in Bengal, which determines the importance of rice and dal in Bengali daily life.