Bangladeshi

This staple of Bangladeshi home cooking is packed with flavor and comes together easily and quickly on any busy weeknight. 

Just a sprinkle of this hot, warm, and sweet spice blend will enhance any dish—especially when you take a few minutes to make it yourself. 

Canned coconut milk + bottled mustard = an exquisitely simple sauce for any flaky whitefish.

Bharta is a Bangladeshi style of seasoned meat or mashed vegetables usually served at room temperature alongside hot steamed rice.

Flaky, nutty, buttery paratha you can prep ahead.

These Bangladeshi sweet fritters are fluffy and tender on the inside, crispy and craggy on the outside.

Shingaras are the Bangladeshi style of samosas—filled and fried savory pastries usually served as an appetizer or snack.

 Resurrect your leftover Thanksgiving turkey as a big pot of fragrant, beautifully-spiced turkey biryani.

Traditional rice pudding contains cream, eggs, and sugar. You’ll find none of that here. You will find healthful whole-grain brown rice, raisins, creamy Greek yogurt, and lovely flavor from real vanilla bean and cinnamon. Eat any leftovers for breakfast.

This rice pudding is known as kheer in North India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and eaten under different names throughout South Asia. It consists, in its basic version, of nothing more than milk, cardamom for flavor and aroma, rice, and sugar. In villages and towns, rice harvests are generally celebrated with a kheer. In some communities, new husbands and wives feed each other a spoonful of kheer during the final part of the wedding ritual. It may be served lukewarm, at room temperature, or cold. Because it is associated with celebration, expensive ingredients are often added, such as saffron, nuts, and dried fruit. Here is the basic version, the one I love the most; you may scatter a tablespoon of chopped pistachios over the top before serving.

At Bengali banquets, this chutney, along with deep-fried, puffed white-flour breads (loochis) and pappadoms, is served as the penultimate course, just before the dessert. Here in the Western world, I tend to serve it with the main meal: I layer it thickly on hamburgers, serve dollops with fried chicken and roast lamb, use it as a spread for cheese sandwiches, and, at Indian meals, offer it as a relish with my kebabs and curries.

An everyday dal to be served with rice, vegetables, and curries. (In Bangladesh, the curry would often be made with fish.)

This belongs to a category of Bangladeshi foods known as bharats. Part relish and part vegetable dish, they add extra flavor to a meal. We are beginning to find peeled and seeded butternut squash in our supermarkets now, making this dish a snap to make. Those who cannot find it will need to use a peeler to get the skin off. I like to use mustard oil here, as it gives a very Bengali taste to the dish. If you have never used it, this might be a good time to try. Otherwise, use olive oil. I love this with all pork dishes and at vegetarian meals with other vegetables, dal, and pooris (a deep-fried flatbread).

Beef is eaten by Muslims throughout India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh and is often referred to as bara gosht, or “big meat.” It is sometimes “baked” using an ancient top-of-the-stove method known as dum. A tightly closed pot with the meat inside (or it could be rice and meat) is placed over low embers and more charcoal is placed on top of the flat lid. With heat coming from the top and the bottom, a slow baking ensues. When the pot is opened, the aromas permeate the room to great cries of appreciation. I find that an oven can, very conveniently, do a dum with similar results. Serve with rice or Indian breads. Black Beans are also good on the side along with vegetables and relishes for an elegant meal.

I had this dish in Bangladesh and thought it was exquisite. It seemed to have come straight from the palaces of seventeenth-century Moghul rulers. It was a true korma, a stew cooked in yogurt, mild but exquisitely seasoned, and without any brown, yellow, or red spices to mar its pallor. There were some New World sliced green chilies scattered over the top, but they seemed a later addition. I have put them in—but even without them, the flavors are beyond compare. Of course, it helps to get a good-quality organic chicken. Have your butcher skin it and cut it into small serving pieces for you. In Bangladesh, this chicken was cooked in ghee (clarified butter, page 286). I generally cook in oil. I like to use a good sour yogurt here, such as the acidophilus yogurt I get from the health-food store. If you cannot get that, just add 1 tablespoon lemon juice to the ordinary supermarket yogurt. Serve this with rice or flatbreads or even in a Western way with potatoes and a vegetable.

In Bangladesh, the basic diet is fish and rice. It is not fish from the Bay of Bengal, the sea that rules their shores, that the people thrive on. In fact, they hardly touch that. What they love is the sweet-water fish that comes from their estuaries, rivers, lakes, and ponds. Since local Bangladeshi fish are unavailable to most of us, I have adapted this recipe to fillet of flounder. One of the common local seasonings is an aromatic lime leaf very similar to the kaffir lime leaf of Thailand. If you cannot get that, use fresh curry leaves, or, failing that, fresh basil leaves. Serve with plain rice, a dal, and a vegetable or salad.