As I noted a couple of days ago, there’ll be a fair bit of food on the blog this month. We ate out quite a lot in Delhi in our 3.5 weeks here (we return to Minnesota tomorrow) and ate a few excellent meals, some interesting meals, some good meals and some indifferent meals. Almost all of them will be covered. In the meantime here’s a little something to whet the appetite.

Bhetki, a type of Barramundi, is very popular in Bengal (Maach just means fish). Paturi refers to dishes steamed in banana/plantain leaf parcels. This sort of preparation is very common in eastern India (and probably elsewhere in India too) just as it is in other parts of East Asia. Oh Calcutta’s version is not bad but they only steam the fish with a piquant mustard paste which makes it kind of one-dimensional. Just a day before we’d had the version made by one of my aunts (an incredible cook) and her version which includes shredded coconut caused this one to pale in close proximity/comparison.

This was the dish that first sold us on Swagath a decade ago. Very fiddly to eat if you get it with whole crab as we did on this occasion but very good. There is also a less fiddly shelled crab option and looking back, I think in the past I may actually have preferred the version with squid. To mop this up we got some neer dosas (soft, white and nothing like the crisp dosas most people in the West, or North India, for that matter, are familiar with); but I unaccountably did not photograph them.