Banana Peels and Fiddlehead Ferns
Stories by Sohel Sarkar and Claire Sibonney
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A Cuisine of Peels, Stalks, Bones, and Seeds
By Sohel Sarkar
Don’t throw away the peels, the food bloggers at Bong Eats instruct as they chop raw bananas for a Bengali-style kofta curry. The end of their video leads viewers to another recipe, where the peels are turned into a side dish with mustard paste.
These foods may remind you of the root-to-shoot trend that got a lot of attention in the US in the late 2010s, but in Bengali cuisine, the food I grew up on, this is neither new nor exceptional. Here, potato and bottle gourd peels are sliced and fried; fibrous cauliflower stalks are chopped, steamed, and sauteed into a spicy side dish; meaty heads of carp lend umami to lentils; and fish bones and pumpkin seeds add body to vegetable medleys. Today, these humble dishes are championed as examples of a sustainable food culture, but their origins lie in a disturbing period in Bengal’s history: in the recurrent famines that devastated the region during British colonialism.
Famines, of which there’s little record in pre-colonial India, mark both the start and end of British colonial rule. The first instance of mass starvation struck barely a decade after the British East India Company’s capture of the Bengal province in 1757, which gave them exclusive revenue collecting authority in the new colony. In 1769, drought hit the Bengal countryside after erratic monsoons led to two failed crops of rice, a staple in the region. Droughts were not uncommon in this part of the world; what changed was the apathy of its rulers. Despite multiple bad harvests, the British continued to extract exorbitant land taxes from starving peasants, and seized and hoarded rice to feed their troops, putting the grain out of the reach of the native population. By 1771, a third of Bengal’s 30 million people died of starvation. Over the next two centuries, five other famines (in 1783, 1873-74, 1866, 1896-97 and 1943) ravaged Bengal, particularly its rural population.
It’s this history of hunger that triggered Bengali cuisine’s zero-waste underpinnings. During each famine, as rice and other staples became inaccessible, women used every possible part of a vegetable or fish – peels, stalks and stems, leaves, seeds, flowers and bones – to stretch meals and feed their families. Some authors attribute the strictly vegetarian dishes made from scraps, such as the peels of bottle gourd or potato, to the harsh dietary strictures – no meat, fish, onion or garlic – imposed on Bengali Hindu upper-caste widows. But the frugality that upper-caste widows had to exercise pales in comparison to the egregious scarcity of famines. During the 1943 famine, people scoured the countryside for river snails, grass seedlings, leaves of taro and jute, and barely edible rice husks. Marigold flowers were turned into fritters; people ate cinnamon bark and chewed up cloves and cardamom; even fruits discarded by bats could not be wasted.
Each time normalcy returned, the memory of deprivation ensured that these eating practices lingered as is or were elevated and assimilated into the cuisine. Today, snails are eaten in rural Bengal by people who cannot afford meat. Taro leaves are cooked with shrimp or hilsa (a type of herring), taro stems are used in curries, and jute and taro leaves are eaten as fritters. Bones of barramundi cooked with potatoes are a delicacy, and carp heads added to lentils occupy a vaunted place in wedding lunches. These dishes are an integral part of the cuisine, but the traumatic memory of their origins are seldom far behind.
Click here for more on the invention of famine.
Celebrate Spring With the Quirkiest Little Veggie
By Claire Sibonney
In the low-lying floodplains of eastern Canada and its neighbors in New England, foraging fiddleheads — the tightly curled and delectable tips of the ostrich fern — is an early spring tradition that dates back centuries. One of the rare vegetables native to these winter-weary climates, fiddleheads grow wild near thawing rivers and streams and in moist, wooded areas, but you have to pick them quickly: Their gorgeous and delicious unfurled state lasts only a few days, and when it's over, the mature ostrich fern becomes inedible.
Their short lifespan isn't the only fascinating thing about them. Although fossil records show that fiddleheads and ferns predate dinosaurs by more than 100 million years, for the longest time, people couldn’t explain how they reproduced since they lack flowers or seeds. The answer to the mystery is spores: The plants have male and female sex cells which, like animal sperm and eggs, produce dotted sporangia on the underside of their leaves. The ferns then release the spores, which float away in the wind or in water to produce new plants.
This enigma also inspired folklore around the world — from Indigenous peoples of North America and New Zealand to Japanese and European people, who saw ferns as symbols of love, eternal youth, and magic. In Shakespeare’s “Henry IV,” Gadsill the thief credits the otherworldly “fern seed” for rendering him invisible.
Part of fiddleheads’ appeal is that as vegetables go, that they’re lovely to look at: in fact, the fiddlehead name is a reference to their strong resemblance to the scroll, the curved piece of wood at the end of the neck of fiddles and other stringed instruments.
These days, fiddleheads can be found at farmers’ markets and specialty grocers, not just in the wild. Fans describe the flavor as being somewhere between asparagus, green beans, and broccoli stems: slightly sweet, grassy, and earthy. Eating them raw or undercooked can cause food poisoning, so the young fern shoots must be boiled or steamed for at least 10 minutes. You’ll be rewarded with a unique taste of spring, either simply sautéed in butter to retain the special flavor, color, and texture; or less conventionally, battered and fried, folded into frittatas or mixed into creamy, cheese-filled tarts. But remember to act fast: fiddlehead season typically starts in April and is over before the end of May.
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