Yes, posto means poppy seeds. In Bihar and Eastern UP they call it Posta Dana. In Bengali cuisine specially in the western part of undivided Bengal it is widely used.
N.B. Wiki says in Hindi it is called Khas Khas. I have never heard it though. BTW in Europe too it is very popular.
I have never felt it myself, but some people say after you consume in a large quantity you feel sleepy and eventually get a nice sleep. I think it is exaggerated.
No no it isn't. In the summer heat, if you have rice and potato-posto seed curry, you are bound to feel drowsy, and feel rejuvenated post the siesta. It is good for stomach and keeps he heat at bay. Posto seeds are used in other curries as well. Popular in dry and hot laterite zones of Bengal ( Burdwan, Birbhum, Purulia & Midnapore districts), it is primarily a ghoti item.
How British greed spurred the creation of one of Bengal’s most loved dishes
Can a residual by-product of the opium plant become a highly prized spice? It can. Ask any Bengali what he or she has had for lunch, and more often than not the answer will be Alu-Posto (potatoes in poppy seed paste). Or, maybe, it could be kancha posto (raw poppy-seed paste) with generous amounts of mustard oil and rice. It’s not for nothing that well-known author Chitrita Banerji says: “It’s used in other cuisines but its prolific, enthusiastic, even singleminded utilisation is only to be seen in Bengal….”
Synonymous today with a perfect ‘Bengali’ meal, especially when teamed with biuli or urad dal, it is interesting to note that this coveted dish, which West Bengal proudly lays claim to (here I will request those who trace their roots to the erstwhile East Bengal to take a backseat) has rather unholy yet hugely historic antecedents.
Drug trade, exploitation and the Opium Wars
The opium poppy, from which posto, khus khus or poppy seeds is derived, has a long relationship with India, not as a gourmet ingredient but as a medicinal plant. A remedy for a number of ailments, it finds mention in the Dhanwantari Nighantu, one of the oldest Indian texts dealing with the properties of drugs. It slowly took on the form of a recreational drug during the reign of the Mughal emperor Akbar. Its cultivation was stepped up by royal diktat, and the beautiful crimson flower found a special place as well in royal textile motifs. The tiny dried white seeds formed after the drug had been extracted from the latex of the poppy seedpods were non-narcotic and crept into the royal kitchens primarily as a texture enhancer and thickener for gravies. The story may have ended there had not the British discovered the huge market for illegal opium in China soon after the Battle of Plassey in 1757, which is when they first set up their base in Bengal.
The crimson booty of the British Overnight huge tracts of agricultural land in the Bengal Presidency were transformed into rolling poppy fields and while the native farmer lamented the death of golden harvests, the British raked in a crimson booty. English civil servants fanned out into the western areas of Bengal, into Bihar and Orissa, bleeding a once-thriving agricultural economy dry. Robbed of the produce that fed the family — a miserable state compounded by the ‘aphim’-induced stupor of her husband — the farmer’s wife looked for ways to supplement the meagre meals put together by foraging in forests, ponds and groves. The enormous amounts of dried out poppy seed, left as waste by the colonial masters, suddenly took on an important role. She experimented with it and found much to her delight that the seeds when ground to a paste exuded a nutty flavour, blended well with mustard oil and enhanced the frugal meals of panta bhaat (soaked leftover rice), or boiled potatoes. In the intense dry heat of the area, it also cooled the body. Thus was born the Bengali’s cherished posto. As Banerji observes: “An added bonus is its slightly soporific effect, which deepens the post lunch siesta for an ease loving Bengali”.
The rise and rise of posto Not surprising then that it soon entered every Bengali home, crossing the Padma river into erstwhile eastern Bengal. It was used with tamarind as a refreshing cooler; in aumbole, the rich paste redolent with mustard oil; eaten raw or cooked with potatoes and various tubers such as yams and colocassia, and with fish and vegetables such as the ridge gourd or pointed gourd or brinjals, and it was a winner all the way.
The innovations continued primarily because posto had the entire region bordering the Chotanagpur Plateau, areas such as Bankura and Birbhum, in its thrall. It crept into the kitchens of Burdwan, travelled to Midnapore where it got added to the portfolio of kitchen art as ornamentation for Goyna bori (Jewellery Vadis), and occupied a place of honour in the Vaishnav vegetarian traditions of Nadia. It continues to dominate the palates and plates of those hailing from these regions.
Recipes featuring posto are aplenty today and range from simple fritters to main courses made with hitherto forbidden ingredients in Bengali vegetarian cuisine such as the peyanj posto, made with onions, or the roshun diye posto, made with garlic. As it entered the more sophisticated portals of urban kitchens it was added to eggs, fancier fish preparations and meats. The crowning glory was its use in the jewel of Bengal’s culinary legacy, the shukto. And, in an emulation of East European and European traditions of Jewish and British settlers in Calcutta — read poppy seed cakes and pastries and its use as a garnish on breads and savouries — the Bengali sandesh, too, was rolled in roasted poppy seeds to lend it a crunchy exterior.
Post Independence, with the government clamping down hard on opium poppy cultivation, posto became an even more prized item due to its scarcity and, hence, exclusivity, and the once residual product climbed the price charts. Much like how the once humble pate or foie gras, made by European peasants from animal offal for protein and warmth in bitter winters now occupies pride of place on fine dining tables.
So next time you order an alu-posto at some Bengali restaurant, know that what you are eating is just a tip of an entire culinary repertoire born out of waste.
The fiery flavours of East Bengal’s dried and fermented fish are all the notes of life
It’s always got a bad rep. But in the fiery flavours of East Bengal’s dried and fermented fish are all the notes of life, from the heat of spice to the decay of time and tide
The memory is cloudy. As was the day. Black lines of pine against the cold, colourless sky as I walked home from school. But on my lunch plate, there was a dab of darkish maroon. As I ate, slowly mixing the shidol chaatni — a mash of dried, fermented fish, smooth but for the prick of delicate, easy-to-chew bones — with the rice, the afternoon’s gloom seemed to lift. My eyes watered from the heat of chilli and garlic, my ears reddened, my mouth came alive with a burst of flavours. I was warmed. Hours after the meal, I could find it on my fingers — the smell, like a secret, hot, fierce, and illicit.
Growing up in the tiny Sylheti community of Shillong, I knew there was something not kosher about shidol and shutki (dried fish). The preserved fish eaten by Bengalis who originally belonged to the Sylhet and Chittagong districts of what is now Bangladesh was — if not a secret — then definitely an embarrassment. For one, it marked us out as ungainly, rustic outsiders — much like our angular Bengali accent — as we ventured out of our tiny outposts in the Northeast and into Kolkata. Its cooking was preceded by nervous shutting of windows and worry at neighbours’ noses wrinkling in disgust. Those who know not how they sin have associated the fragrance of shutki with that of mildewed, rotting socks or decaying animals. I still recall the pang of regret when a friend in Kolkata — from epaar Bangla (this side of Bengal) — exclaimed, “It does stink, you know.”
My mother remembers watching her Manipuri neighbour soak a large bowl of shidol (tiny silvery fermented putthi machh) in water, and grinding it to a paste with an equal amount of red chillies. A dab of the chaatni with a large mound of rice was breakfast for her large family. The shidol is evidence of the continuity in the culinary histories of Northeast’s tribal and non-tribal communities, not always known to live harmoniously. Food historian Pritha Sen says that while eaten across then East Pakistan, shidol and shutki were most popular in the Sylhet and Chittagong districts. “Because these were tribal-dominated areas. And, in my opinion, that is why the tradition continued in these places, while the more non-tribal areas and communities slowly discontinued it. Dried fish and shidol are eaten all over north Bengal and the Northeast by tribal and non-tribal communities till date, because the two cultures still coexist,” she says. Last year, for example, finance ministers of several states in the Northeast took up half-hour of a GST council meet to lobby for a tax exemption on the dried fish.
Like in all cultures, excess of fish and meat are preserved/salted to avoid wastage — and with an eye on the uncertain future, when there might not be enough. In the villages of Assam’s Barak Valley, freshwater fish like pabda, puthi, tyangra and the superstar, ilish, are fermented and dried around August-September, before the onset of winter. Eventually, dried Bombay Duck or lotka/loitta shutki also found its way into our kitchens — one reason why Mumbai’s salty odour of drying-decaying fish endears the great city to me. I would later discover that this peculiar smelly secret of ours is a delicacy in several cuisines — from Goan to Naga, Tamil to Kashmiri.
There is the smell, of course. But shutki and shidol have got a bad rep because they are a poor man’s delicacy. “It is associated with tribal cuisine and food of the lower strata of society. As we become more affluent, we want to dissociate ourselves from the food of the masses. Also, mostly people from the West Bengal looked down upon it, right? That is because the culture changed across the river Padma and so did the eating habits. West Bengal did not have the custom of eating dried fish,” says Sen. Especially after the Partition and the 1971 war of liberation, when people from East Bengal came in as refugees, says Sen, food habits of the “outsiders” were the first to be mocked. “The language and accent were mocked later,” she says.
The streets of Bengaluru jostle with accents and tongues — you can hear at least six different languages on a 15-minute walk in this astonishingly multicultural city. On lucky days, the dialect of Sylhet is the seventh. When two Sylhetis meet, they lapse into their mother tongue with gleeful freedom. I was a newbie to the city when I met one such compatriot, a salesman at the neighbourhood supermarket. “Shutki khain ni? Koi faimu? (Do you eat shutki? Where can you find it?),” I asked. He asked me to wait, turned a corner and came back with two packs of dried Bombay Duck and shrimp. I went home assured. This was a city I could be friends with.
Each recipe carries the distilled wisdom of experiments carried out generations ago. My ancestors knew that dried and fermented fish can make vegetables sing. As a child, I would love dried shrimp and ripe pumpkin cooked together with a lot of garlic — the perfect balance of sweet, hot and meaty flavours come together just right. I have grown to love more fiery creations, with no reservations. Both shidol and shutki are cooked with seasonal vegetables such as brinjal or squash — either as a dry relish or a spicy comforting broth. It could also be had on its own, just roasted with onions, garlic and chilli and mashed.
But the shining star of this sub-cuisine is the shidoler bora. The shidol would be pounded and cooked with plenty of garlic, onion and chillies. The dark-maroon paste would then be placed at the heart of a fresh squash or pumpkin leaf, wrapped, dunked in a batter of besan or maida and deep-fried. Had with rice, it is a slow, time-lapse experience of cascading flavours — from the crispness of the batter to the leaf’s slightly rough texture and the spicy, fragrant shidol hidden inside like a secret.
Those who arrive from small towns often experience the metropolis as a dislocation; as a place that demands that you shed your provincial habits for a scrubbed, more polished self. It is, perhaps, reflected in the whittling away in the diversity of the things we eat, in the colonisation of our palate by sweet, salty and mainstream flavours. Shutki remains an acquired taste. It is (and will remain) resistant to the easy evangelism of Instagram filters and is unlikely to find place in hipster diets. But in its stack of smells and tastes are all the notes of life — from the heat of spice to the decay of time and tide. It will linger on my fingers, for a long time to come.
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N.B. Wiki says in Hindi it is called Khas Khas. I have never heard it though. BTW in Europe too it is very popular.
How British greed spurred the creation of one of Bengal’s most loved dishes
Can a residual by-product of the opium plant become a highly prized spice? It can. Ask any Bengali what he or she has had for lunch, and more often than not the answer will be Alu-Posto (potatoes in poppy seed paste). Or, maybe, it could be kancha posto (raw poppy-seed paste) with generous amounts of mustard oil and rice. It’s not for nothing that well-known author Chitrita Banerji says: “It’s used in other cuisines but its prolific, enthusiastic, even singleminded utilisation is only to be seen in Bengal….”
Synonymous today with a perfect ‘Bengali’ meal, especially when teamed with biuli or urad dal, it is interesting to note that this coveted dish, which West Bengal proudly lays claim to (here I will request those who trace their roots to the erstwhile East Bengal to take a backseat) has rather unholy yet hugely historic antecedents.
Drug trade, exploitation and the Opium Wars
The opium poppy, from which posto, khus khus or poppy seeds is derived, has a long relationship with India, not as a gourmet ingredient but as a medicinal plant. A remedy for a number of ailments, it finds mention in the Dhanwantari Nighantu, one of the oldest Indian texts dealing with the properties of drugs. It slowly took on the form of a recreational drug during the reign of the Mughal emperor Akbar. Its cultivation was stepped up by royal diktat, and the beautiful crimson flower found a special place as well in royal textile motifs. The tiny dried white seeds formed after the drug had been extracted from the latex of the poppy seedpods were non-narcotic and crept into the royal kitchens primarily as a texture enhancer and thickener for gravies. The story may have ended there had not the British discovered the huge market for illegal opium in China soon after the Battle of Plassey in 1757, which is when they first set up their base in Bengal.
The crimson booty of the British
Overnight huge tracts of agricultural land in the Bengal Presidency were transformed into rolling poppy fields and while the native farmer lamented the death of golden harvests, the British raked in a crimson booty. English civil servants fanned out into the western areas of Bengal, into Bihar and Orissa, bleeding a once-thriving agricultural economy dry. Robbed of the produce that fed the family — a miserable state compounded by the ‘aphim’-induced stupor of her husband — the farmer’s wife looked for ways to supplement the meagre meals put together by foraging in forests, ponds and groves. The enormous amounts of dried out poppy seed, left as waste by the colonial masters, suddenly took on an important role. She experimented with it and found much to her delight that the seeds when ground to a paste exuded a nutty flavour, blended well with mustard oil and enhanced the frugal meals of panta bhaat (soaked leftover rice), or boiled potatoes. In the intense dry heat of the area, it also cooled the body. Thus was born the Bengali’s cherished posto. As Banerji observes: “An added bonus is its slightly soporific effect, which deepens the post lunch siesta for an ease loving Bengali”.
The rise and rise of posto
Not surprising then that it soon entered every Bengali home, crossing the Padma river into erstwhile eastern Bengal. It was used with tamarind as a refreshing cooler; in aumbole, the rich paste redolent with mustard oil; eaten raw or cooked with potatoes and various tubers such as yams and colocassia, and with fish and vegetables such as the ridge gourd or pointed gourd or brinjals, and it was a winner all the way.
The innovations continued primarily because posto had the entire region bordering the Chotanagpur Plateau, areas such as Bankura and Birbhum, in its thrall. It crept into the kitchens of Burdwan, travelled to Midnapore where it got added to the portfolio of kitchen art as ornamentation for Goyna bori (Jewellery Vadis), and occupied a place of honour in the Vaishnav vegetarian traditions of Nadia. It continues to dominate the palates and plates of those hailing from these regions.
Recipes featuring posto are aplenty today and range from simple fritters to main courses made with hitherto forbidden ingredients in Bengali vegetarian cuisine such as the peyanj posto, made with onions, or the roshun diye posto, made with garlic. As it entered the more sophisticated portals of urban kitchens it was added to eggs, fancier fish preparations and meats. The crowning glory was its use in the jewel of Bengal’s culinary legacy, the shukto. And, in an emulation of East European and European traditions of Jewish and British settlers in Calcutta — read poppy seed cakes and pastries and its use as a garnish on breads and savouries — the Bengali sandesh, too, was rolled in roasted poppy seeds to lend it a crunchy exterior.
Post Independence, with the government clamping down hard on opium poppy cultivation, posto became an even more prized item due to its scarcity and, hence, exclusivity, and the once residual product climbed the price charts. Much like how the once humble pate or foie gras, made by European peasants from animal offal for protein and warmth in bitter winters now occupies pride of place on fine dining tables.
So next time you order an alu-posto at some Bengali restaurant, know that what you are eating is just a tip of an entire culinary repertoire born out of waste.
The fiery flavours of East Bengal’s dried and fermented fish are all the notes of life
It’s always got a bad rep. But in the fiery flavours of East Bengal’s dried and fermented fish are all the notes of life, from the heat of spice to the decay of time and tide
The memory is cloudy. As was the day. Black lines of pine against the cold, colourless sky as I walked home from school. But on my lunch plate, there was a dab of darkish maroon. As I ate, slowly mixing the shidol chaatni — a mash of dried, fermented fish, smooth but for the prick of delicate, easy-to-chew bones — with the rice, the afternoon’s gloom seemed to lift. My eyes watered from the heat of chilli and garlic, my ears reddened, my mouth came alive with a burst of flavours. I was warmed. Hours after the meal, I could find it on my fingers — the smell, like a secret, hot, fierce, and illicit.
Growing up in the tiny Sylheti community of Shillong, I knew there was something not kosher about shidol and shutki (dried fish). The preserved fish eaten by Bengalis who originally belonged to the Sylhet and Chittagong districts of what is now Bangladesh was — if not a secret — then definitely an embarrassment. For one, it marked us out as ungainly, rustic outsiders — much like our angular Bengali accent — as we ventured out of our tiny outposts in the Northeast and into Kolkata. Its cooking was preceded by nervous shutting of windows and worry at neighbours’ noses wrinkling in disgust. Those who know not how they sin have associated the fragrance of shutki with that of mildewed, rotting socks or decaying animals. I still recall the pang of regret when a friend in Kolkata — from epaar Bangla (this side of Bengal) — exclaimed, “It does stink, you know.”
My mother remembers watching her Manipuri neighbour soak a large bowl of shidol (tiny silvery fermented putthi machh) in water, and grinding it to a paste with an equal amount of red chillies. A dab of the chaatni with a large mound of rice was breakfast for her large family. The shidol is evidence of the continuity in the culinary histories of Northeast’s tribal and non-tribal communities, not always known to live harmoniously. Food historian Pritha Sen says that while eaten across then East Pakistan, shidol and shutki were most popular in the Sylhet and Chittagong districts. “Because these were tribal-dominated areas. And, in my opinion, that is why the tradition continued in these places, while the more non-tribal areas and communities slowly discontinued it. Dried fish and shidol are eaten all over north Bengal and the Northeast by tribal and non-tribal communities till date, because the two cultures still coexist,” she says. Last year, for example, finance ministers of several states in the Northeast took up half-hour of a GST council meet to lobby for a tax exemption on the dried fish.
Like in all cultures, excess of fish and meat are preserved/salted to avoid wastage — and with an eye on the uncertain future, when there might not be enough. In the villages of Assam’s Barak Valley, freshwater fish like pabda, puthi, tyangra and the superstar, ilish, are fermented and dried around August-September, before the onset of winter. Eventually, dried Bombay Duck or lotka/loitta shutki also found its way into our kitchens — one reason why Mumbai’s salty odour of drying-decaying fish endears the great city to me. I would later discover that this peculiar smelly secret of ours is a delicacy in several cuisines — from Goan to Naga, Tamil to Kashmiri.
There is the smell, of course. But shutki and shidol have got a bad rep because they are a poor man’s delicacy. “It is associated with tribal cuisine and food of the lower strata of society. As we become more affluent, we want to dissociate ourselves from the food of the masses. Also, mostly people from the West Bengal looked down upon it, right? That is because the culture changed across the river Padma and so did the eating habits. West Bengal did not have the custom of eating dried fish,” says Sen. Especially after the Partition and the 1971 war of liberation, when people from East Bengal came in as refugees, says Sen, food habits of the “outsiders” were the first to be mocked. “The language and accent were mocked later,” she says.
The streets of Bengaluru jostle with accents and tongues — you can hear at least six different languages on a 15-minute walk in this astonishingly multicultural city. On lucky days, the dialect of Sylhet is the seventh. When two Sylhetis meet, they lapse into their mother tongue with gleeful freedom. I was a newbie to the city when I met one such compatriot, a salesman at the neighbourhood supermarket. “Shutki khain ni? Koi faimu? (Do you eat shutki? Where can you find it?),” I asked. He asked me to wait, turned a corner and came back with two packs of dried Bombay Duck and shrimp. I went home assured. This was a city I could be friends with.
Each recipe carries the distilled wisdom of experiments carried out generations ago. My ancestors knew that dried and fermented fish can make vegetables sing. As a child, I would love dried shrimp and ripe pumpkin cooked together with a lot of garlic — the perfect balance of sweet, hot and meaty flavours come together just right. I have grown to love more fiery creations, with no reservations. Both shidol and shutki are cooked with seasonal vegetables such as brinjal or squash — either as a dry relish or a spicy comforting broth. It could also be had on its own, just roasted with onions, garlic and chilli and mashed.
But the shining star of this sub-cuisine is the shidoler bora. The shidol would be pounded and cooked with plenty of garlic, onion and chillies. The dark-maroon paste would then be placed at the heart of a fresh squash or pumpkin leaf, wrapped, dunked in a batter of besan or maida and deep-fried. Had with rice, it is a slow, time-lapse experience of cascading flavours — from the crispness of the batter to the leaf’s slightly rough texture and the spicy, fragrant shidol hidden inside like a secret.
Those who arrive from small towns often experience the metropolis as a dislocation; as a place that demands that you shed your provincial habits for a scrubbed, more polished self. It is, perhaps, reflected in the whittling away in the diversity of the things we eat, in the colonisation of our palate by sweet, salty and mainstream flavours. Shutki remains an acquired taste. It is (and will remain) resistant to the easy evangelism of Instagram filters and is unlikely to find place in hipster diets. But in its stack of smells and tastes are all the notes of life — from the heat of spice to the decay of time and tide. It will linger on my fingers, for a long time to come.
I too am not a fan of shutki, though I adore loitta (lote)
But the history, cultural and culinary, about the fish is interesting