Bengali-style cabbage with prawns or badakopi torkari

Right back to a bit more Bengali food now. This cabbage dish is a staple of Bengali cooking, and one I remember being forced to eat when I was small. I would assiduously pick out all the prawns (and eat them), have a tiny bit of cabbage and then declare that I'd 'finished'. I didn't get away with this that often. Happily I am now a big fan of cabbage in all its forms, from Savoy to the white stuff.

Traditionally Bengali vegetable dishes aren't often cooked with garlic or onions, and so this cabbage recipe uses a simple combination of ginger and whole cumin seeds. Adding prawns is optional, and if you want to keep things vegetarian, peas are a good substitute. And in fact, having both in there is fine too.

Recipe (enough for 4 as part of a larger meal):

1 white cabbage, washed and shredded
Large thumb-sized piece of ginger, squashed to a paste
1 dried bay leaf
1 piece of cinnamon/cassia bark
1 green chilli
2 cardamon pods, split
1-2 tsp turmeric
2 tsp whole cumin seeds
1-2 tblsp sunflower (or other plain) oil
Around 150g cooked prawns and/or a couple of handfuls of peas
1 tsp salt, or enough to season


Heat up the oil in a large-ish flat bottomed pan (ideally) and when it's hot, but not smoking, throw in the bay leaf, cinnamon, cardamon. After a minute or two, add in the ginger and cumin seeds, and continue to stir over a medium heat for another couple of minutes. When the ginger is just starting to cook through and the seeds are slightly brown, put the cabbage in and stir everything really well. The residual water from washing the cabbage should provide enough liquid and steam to cook it. Once the cabbage has shrunk down a little, add the turmeric, salt, and green chilli (prick a couple of holes in it with a knife, so you get the flavour but not the heat), and stir well. Cook the cabbage for at least 15 minutes over a low heat with a lid on the pan- it should be completely tender and mildly yellow. Finally put in the prawns or the peas (defrosted if frozen), mix everything together and cook for a further 5 minutes until it's all heated through. Serve with rice or anything else Indian.

Saag- Bengali-style spring greens

I guess going to Kolkata recently has made me think about cooking Bengali food a bit more regularly. So here's something that's pretty easy to make, but is rather delicious. Bengali vegetable dishes don't tend to include garlic, but this recipe for spring greens is an exception. The greens are braised with garlic and kalo jeera (black onion seeds) until soft and very tender, and then finished off with a bit of ghee. It's an ideal side dish to go with other Indian food, but I suspect it would be quite nice with a bit of poached fish too.

Recipe (enough for 4-6 as a side dish):

2-3 heads of spring greens, around 500g, washed and shredded
4-5 fat cloves of garlic, crushed
2-3 heaped tsps kalo jeera/black onion seeds
1-2 Indian green chillis (optional)
1 generous tblsp ghee
1-2 tblsp sunflower (or another plain) oil
1 tsp salt (or adjust to taste)

Heat the oil in a large, wide-bottomed pan, and when it's warm put in the black onion seeds. Swirl them around a bit, and as the oil gets hotter they'll start to spit and pop. This should only take a minute or so, and when they start doing this add the garlic. Turn down the heat if necessary, as the garlic shouldn't really brown much. After another minute put the greens in and give everything a really good stir to make sure that the garlic and kalo jeera aren't all stuck on the bottom of the pan. Pierce the whole green chillis a couple of times, so that they release their flavour but hardly any heat, and add them to the greens with the salt. Give everything another good stir, turn the heat down low, put a lid on, and allow the greens to cook for at least 15 minutes. The residual water left on the leaves from washing them should create some steam which will help cook them, but stir occasionally to make sure nothing is sticking to the pan. When the greens are completely cooked, add the ghee and stir it through to coat all the leaves. This is one of those times when you don't want your vegetables to have any bite to them, and the greens should be cooked all the way through with the stalks easily falling apart. The saag won't look that exciting but the generous amounts of garlic and ghee do a very good job of pepping up these otherwise rather boring vegetables. Serve with rice and dahl, (or something else).