Category Archives: Foodways

Kasha Mangsho

Nationality: Singaporean
Age: 48
Occupation: IBM
Residence: Singapore
Performance Date: 4/21/17
Primary Language: Bengali
Language: Bengali

Background Information: This is a long and complicated traditional Bengali (West Bengal is a northeastern Indian state) recipe that my father makes at home, and that he learned by watching his mother (my grandmother) make it at home as he was growing up. In Bengali, kashano means “to cook slowly on a low flame”. While mangsho directly translates to “meat”, it is generally used, in everyday vernacular, to refer to goat-meat or mutton. The dish is usually eaten with luchi, a deep-fried flatbread made of wheat flour. The combination of luchi and kasha mangsho is usually saved for weekend lunches or special occassions. My father moved to Singapore from India in his 20s, and has started making this dish quite recently – in the last 5 or so years.

Recipe: “So basically, kasha mangsho is a traditional Bengali dish, and what happens is that there is a thick gravy, which is what kasha mangsho means. The original name comes from the slow cooking – which in Bengali is called kashano, so basically slowly cooking the spices. So the ingredient is, mangsho of course… lamb, or goat meat. And this will be with bone – not without bone. That’s the speciality. Let’s say 1kg of mutton with bone, and we’ll take about 4 medium size potatoes cut into cubes… yeah medium size potatoes 4 or 5, cut into cubes, or halves. Uh…then, onion… probably about… 1kg will be about 2 medium size, not too small, medium size onions… Uh, chopped… Then… little bit of ginger and garlic paste… Probably, I would use 1 1/2 tablespoon of garlic and 1 tablespoon of ginger. And then for spices I use whole garam masala. So basically cardamom, cinnamon, bay leaves, and uh, cloves. These are whole garam masala. And apart from that spices are… turmeric powder, red chilli powder, uh… little bit of cumin powder and coriander powder. So these are the only four spices that go in. Generally, if you are cooking with lamb or mutton, and especially goat meat, which is mostly used in India, it is always preferable to boil it. I mean, basically boil it using a pressure cooker kind of thing. Otherwise it takes a very long time to cook. So while we use the pressure cooker to boil it, you can put the whole garam masala. So what happens is that because it is cooked on a pressure cooker with the whole garam masala, the flavour somehow gets infused. And later for making gravy we use the same water, the boiled water or whatever… the stock, or whatever you call it. Once that is done, take a pan and heat some oil. Traditionally Bengali cooking uses mustard oil, but you can also just use normal oil. Fry the onions… uh, the chopped onions, and after frying for a minute or two minutes at the most I use the ginger garlic paste, and I add a little bit of salt because when you add salt to onions, it always releases the… you know, the moisture from the onion, so it doesn’t become dry, its easier to cook. And then while that’s happening, on the side I am preparing the gravy. So I’ll probably take about 3 tablespoons of yoghurt. Plain yoghurt, completely. And then I’ll add 1 teaspoon of turmeric powder, 1 teaspoon of kashmiri red chilli powder, 1 teaspoon of the coriander powder, and half a teaspoon, or even less, of cumin powder. Because cumin has a very strong smell. So you add this to the yoghurt, with a little bit of water, you can mix it very well into a thick paste. So once the onion and ginger-garlic has been fried for maybe 3-4 minutes, add this paste, fry for another just few minutes, and you’ll see the oil separating from it. Then you put the boiled mutton, the potatoes, and then just on a high heat you stir fry for a few minutes. And then what I do is to cook it on a slow flame and cover the pan, and every ten minutes I just stir. I leave it for 45 minutes or so. Kasha mangsho is supposed to be dry, but you still don’t want it to be too dry, and you don’t want the masala to burn, so once you take the cover off you can add a little bit of the stock from before, to make a little more gravy. And add sugar and salt as per taste.”

Thoughts: Food traditions are an important part of Indian, or Bengali culture. My father learned it from watching it being made in his home, and he brought the recipe, and perhaps the memories associated with the food, to Singapore when he moved. Similarly, I have grown up eating his iteration of the dish at home in Singapore, and I have tried making this and other similar recipes at college in Los Angeles. It is also interesting to consider who is involved in these traditions. In my house, my father primarily did the cooking, as he enjoyed it. This was surprising to many, because in most households, the women were used to cooking for the family.

Family steamboat

Nationality: Singaporean
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/26/17
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese

Background Information: Amanda is a Chinese Singaporean in her 2nd year of college, and she and her family grew up in Singapore. Her family, for various reasons, and as a result do not spend as much time with each other as in the past. As such, eating together — and cooking steamboat together, in particular, serves as an important ritual. I interviewed Amanda about this ritual.

Amanda: Once in a while my grandma will get all of us together and cook steamboat, which is basically cooking soup with a ton of ingredients like prawns and leafy vegetables and all that good stuff in the middle of the table on a tabletop stove, so it was a very involved process because we all had to sit there and wait for the soup to boil and then dish out our own meals, and steamboat dinners end up taking maybe 2, slightly more than 2 hours because we’re all talking while eating. We don’t do them very often, but it’s definitely become a special thing now where if I head home to Singapore after a long time, we’ll probably kind of celebrate it or commemorate it with a steamboat dinner, and it’d be a big thing if I invited someone, like a really good friend, to join us. I don’t even know how it really started, or when, because my grandma just did it one day as a very informal thing when before, we really only had steamboats anytime extended family came over, so like for Chinese New Year or a birthday or something like that, but yeah I like that it’s become an ‘our-family’ sort of thing, like the way we like to set everything up, arrange the table, what we talk about over our food, how our conversation topics transition, and how we’ll always end up sitting at the table at least half an hour after all the food’s gone, and usually it ends up being my dad occupied by the TV so he’ll be at the sofa, and it would be one of the few times my mum’s in a joking kind of mood, so the rest of us will just talk to her and share gossip from our lives and stuff.   

Thoughts: Again, it is very interesting to me how food traditions have many important social functions. Here, not only is the mere act of eating steamboat important, but also the performance of sitting together at a table and cooking it before eating it. This act is a means of bonding for Amanda’s family. Not only that, but it also seems to function as a sort of rite of passage for whoever Amanda invites to join her family It began with her grandmother, and seeing as it holds value for Amanda, it is a tradition that will be continued.

A Poor Chinese Communist’s Guide to Cooking

Nationality: Chinese-American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: La Crescenta, CA
Performance Date: 3/13/17
Primary Language: English

Context: I collected this from a high school friend when we were on a camping trip together over Spring Break.

Background: My friend is Chinese on his mother’s side, and she grew up in a poorer part of Communist China.

The Cooking Method: Because of the lack of proper food that poor Chinese people had to eat, they adopted a method of cooking that involved simply throwing whatever was edible and available together “in ways that made it taste good.” Over time the method became just the natural way of cooking to the people, even once regular food and ingredients became available.

Analysis: I like that the originator of this method of cooking is merely the will to survive, rather than simply a single person who decided to start cooking things a certain way. It’s also interesting to point out that these are folk recipes that emerged from a certain socioeconomic climate, a product of a generally difficult time period for the proletariat Chinese. More ties to folklore and the history of a culture.

Conserving Chili Oil

Nationality: Chinese-American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: La Crescenta, CA
Performance Date: 3/13/17
Primary Language: English

Context: I collected this from a high school friend when we were on a camping trip together over Spring Break.

Background: My friend is Chinese on his mother’s side, and she grew up in a poorer part of Communist China.

Dialogue: Recently, when my mom cooked, she would kind of be leading me through what she was doing, because I was gonna be going to college and needed to know how to cook for myself, live on my own and everything, and in the the past, like, three years I’ve helped her with cooking, helped her with dinner and everything. Um, and specifically, there is a sauce that we had at my house. My entire childhood we had this sauce. It was a, a special chili oil that actually her mo- her father made for her. Um… and I think I’m diverging but that’s fine! But the— this chili oil, like, it’s kind of like… You know how when people make sourdough you need to have, uh, like a seed sourdough batch that you use to build the next one, and then each sourdough is like a build on that previous sourdough? The chili oil was kind of like that, so she would have this— er, her father would have this chili oil that he, he had made a very long time ago, and then it would run low, and then he would just build on what he already had… Um, and so then the chili oil that we have in my house is vastly different from where it began, and honestly I have no idea if he was the first one to make the chili oil. But it’s in little glass jars now, so, it’s… become a little modernized now, at the very least.

Analysis: I really love how symbolic this is of the passing of the family line, and has some connections to the idea of ancestors living on in the form of little bits of chili oil that are still left over from decades earlier. It’s very unique as well, for something out of Chinese culture, and really reflective of how the Communist regime in the country affected the poor, what will the recycling of materials for each fresh batch of chili oil.

Buddha Jumps Over the Wall

Nationality: Vietnamese-American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Palo Alto, CA
Performance Date: 4/17/17
Primary Language: English

Context: One of my roommates, when he heard me explaining to a friend about how stressful it was to try and find folklore from different sources, offered some of the stories he knew from his childhood.

Background: This is a legend behind a certain dish that my roommate knew about.

Dialogue: The way the legend goes is that the original person who created it was cooking the soup, and on the other side of “the wall” there was, um, a Buddhist, or maybe a Buddha, since that’s what they call them when they achieve nirvana, um, meditating, and once the soup was finished it smelled so good that, uh, the Buddhist monk summoned all of his strength and leaped straight over the wall just to have a taste of the soup.

Analysis: I looked up the recipe this legend is based on (see below), and the complicated cooking process is one of the biggest clues as to what might make it delicious enough for a Buddhist monk to forsake their oath of vegetarianism (anything that takes three days to cook MUST taste amazing). While the other stories I’d heard from this roommate revolved around Vietnam, I found that this legend is of Chinese origin, and collectively these pieces then show us how the spread of Buddhism has affected lives and folklore tellings across East and South Asia (or, at least, in more than just one country).

Annotation: The recipe for Buddha Jumps Over the Wall, as well as a slightly different origin of the dish, can be found here.