Bhortas Are Anything But Basic
Text and photographs by Dina Begum
A selection of homemade bhortas. Photograph by Dina Begum
Ask any Bangladeshi about bhorta and it is likely they will wax lyrical about how delicious it is. They may recall a mother’s or grandmother’s recipe and nostalgically transport themselves (and you!) to a table laden with a smorgasbord of bhortas. The premise of the dish is a straightforward one. Take one ingredient. If it’s simple, elevate it; if it’s strong, push it to the limit. A humble dish with widespread popularity amongst Bangladeshis, bhorta is also referred to as bata or satni, and is best described as a mash, usually made with vegetables, seafood, gourds and even meat, mixed with onions, sometimes garlic, and anointed with mustard oil.
Commonly made and widely loved bhortas are those featuring potatoes, aubergines, green beans, tomatoes or lentils as their main ingredient. These ingredients are steamed, roasted or boiled, and prepared to join a chorus of other, usually raw ingredients. Pungent and sharp mustard oil, which has a special place in the country’s cuisine, battles for primacy with green chillies, which are added generously. Yet, the jostle results in an alchemical balance, bringing together the remaining ingredients in perfect synchronicity. There’s coriander for freshness and salt for seasoning. At times, onions are sautéed until they resemble gold alabaster, or fried to a shade of burnt amber, their allium sweetness toning down the sharpness of other elements. Chillies may be scorched over an open flame, or roasted or fried until smoky and dark.
While bharta — particularly made of aubergines — is also popular in Indian and Pakistani cuisines, the variety, breadth and differences in preparation make this dish unique to Bangladesh. There are hundreds of different varieties made with vegetables such as pumpkin and mangetout as well as boiled lentil and bean versions. For bhorta aficionados, shutki — dried or fermented fish, both large and small — and prawns are a favourite, pounded and blended into extremely spicy, umami-packed pastes.Other varieties include bitter greens such as nali shak, kochu or the leaves of the banana foot yam and ol shaak or banana blossoms. Two notable bhortas made with a spice as their star ingredient are astringent kalojeera bhorta using nigella seeds, and naturally hot shorisha (or mustard seed) bhorta. These are more of an acquired taste as they are condiment-like in nature, adding flavour even with the smallest amount. However, the most enduring and widely loved bhorta has to be one made with aloo or potato.
Bhortas can be made of virtually any ingredient. While the most popular kind is made of aloo or potatoes, fish is also a popular choice. Here is a fried rohu fish bhorta. Photograph by Dina Begum
During summer holidays growing up in the UK, I would visit my grandparents’ house and we’d roast potatoes in their garden, placing them in old royal blue biscuit tins, buried deep within thick wooden offcuts from DIY projects. We all knew that Nani, my grandmother, would reserve a few of the potatoes for aloo bhorta. After the briefest cooling period, she would carefully peel the still-hot potatoes and mash the soft, fluffy interior with raw onions and chillies by hand — the traditional technique used to make bhorta — her quiet intention and love bringing the dish to life. A sentiment shared by food writer Nargis Hakim Rahman. “Bhortas are a special treat, made with love,” she says. “Whenever I think of bhorta, I imagine the women in my family laughing and smiling in excitement for a bite with freshly cooked rice.”
In the towns and cities of Bangladesh, bhorta is integral to everyday food habits and highlighted in cookery books such as those of the late Siddika Kabir. A celebrated chef, TV personality and nutritionist, Kabir dedicated a large paragraph in her Bangladeshi Curry Cookbook to bhortas, listing the many varieties, including nutrition-rich ones made with peels of gourd, bitter gourd and green bananas.
However, it is in the villages where bhorta recipes find their best expression, intuitively put together by the women of the household. Village life lends itself perfectly to the preparation of bhortas, due to the access to fresh local produce such as greens, fish, root vegetables, as well as sun dried chillies and freshly cured shutki. Bhortas are often hand ground using a shil bata, a flat slab of stone with a cylindrical stone for rolling, which creates a smoother finish instead of mashing by hand or using a food processor. These rural kitchen gardens are the perfect example of farm-to-table meals made in a simple fashion, where almost every part of fish, poultry, meat and vegetables are used, limiting food waste and creating imaginative bhortas using peels and seeds, including jackfruit seeds, which are dried, boiled and mashed. To call bhorta anything less than complex would be a disservice to what has become one of the national dishes of Bangladesh.
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It is considered mandatory that bhorta be mixed with rice and eaten by hand. This simple act brings a certain satisfaction, which is widely enjoyed in South Asia. Unlike fussier meals, bhorta also has the added advantage of convenience due to the fact that it is virtually ready to eat. There is no need to debone fish or meat, or remove a stray cardamom pod or bay leaf, which makes it great food on the go. While both Hindu and Muslim communities make bhorta, traditional Hindu Bengali recipes can differ in the ingredients used, and often omit onion and garlic, which are commonplace in Muslim preparations. They also veer on the sweeter side, and tend to be made less often in Hindu households.
Living and working between Kolkata and Dhaka, food enthusiast and brand consultant Kaniska Chakraborty has tasted all manner of bhortas. His culinary advice is:“Look beyond hilsa and biryani when in Dhaka. Oh don’t get me wrong, those two are fine. But really, the food which has had the biggest impact on me during my time in Dhaka is the myriad bhortas. Bhorta is where the lines of society get blurred. From an industrialist to a poor rickshaw puller, everyone is a bhorta lover.”
Bhortas are made with a wide assortment of vegetables, fruits, spices, fish and meats. At their most basic, they provide a jolt of flavour to simple meals of bhat or rice. Photograph by Peter Watson
Food often acts as a marker of class in Bangladesh. In affluent areas of Dhaka, for example, coffee bars, sushi restaurants and dessert parlours sit beside perfectly curated social areas, adjoining exclusive gated communities. In the neighbouring division of Sylhet, however, there is a booming industry focusing on traditional home cooking. Restaurants such as Panshi and Paanch Bhai are known for an expansive bhorta menu utilising the recipes and produce of the rural region, where customers are more interested in honest home cooking than fine dining.
A paper focusing on food trends of poor urban and rural households by the Research and Evaluation department of the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) found that the diets of the rich and poor contrast to a greater degree in urban regions. While there was growth in food production and economic growth in the 1990s, the population of the urban poor increased by 100% from 7 million to 14 million, while the rural poor decreased from 58 million to 42 million. The poor mainly depend on rice and vegetable produce as meat, fish and poultry are unaffordable, in part due to rising market prices caused by urbanisation, as well as food distribution inequality and the increase in cash crops and food exports (I.Urey, S. Halder 2003).
This divide is cast in sharp relief in the critically acclaimed film Bhat Dey (The Hunger), in which rural poverty is depicted through the lens of bhat or rice, which is devoured by the protagonists, accompanied by small mounds of bhorta. In contrast, renowned filmmaker Treque Masud’s film Ontorjatra (Homeland) presents well-to-do Bangladeshis who eat rice with cutlery at a table laden with meat and fish dishes and the marked absence of bhortas, which are usually presented in small dishes as a start to a meal.
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The trifecta of rice, fish (mainly ilish or hilsa, pictured here) and bata or mashed dishes is central to Bangladeshi cuisine. Here is a platter of bhortas prepared for Boisakhi or the Bengali new year. Photograph by Dina Begum
The appeal of this seemingly simple dish is multifaceted. Bangladesh is a riverine country, jigsawed together by a multitude of rivers and tributaries. Now in its 50th year, the country is finding its feet in global business and development. The biodiversity of the country has long sustained its people, through wars, famine and recessions. In Bangladesh, living off the land meant relying on what was readily available in remote rural areas. According to UBINIG, an NGO based in Dhaka, uncultivated and foraged foods constitute around 40% of the national diet. When the poor are taken into consideration, nearly their whole diet is made up of leafy greens called shak, tubers, small fish and animals that are found in agricultural fields, forests and waterways. Local communities require sustainable and accessible food, and bhorta fits the role perfectly. So it’s not surprising that the love for this dish grew organically as a facet of living off the land and being connected to it. Bhorta has thus become rooted in Bangladeshi food heritage.
‘Mach e Bhaat e Bangali’ — or ‘fish and rice make a Bengali’ — is an adage that almost all Bengalis from both Bangladesh and West Bengal are familiar with. This is also woven into Bangladeshi food culture. However, bata and bhat or ground/ mashed dishes and rice come a close second, indicating the importance of this dish as a symbol of national identity. Once seen as peasant food, bhorta is now enjoyed and celebrated across all socio-economic strata and is synonymous with Boishakhi or the Bangladeshi New Year, sitting alongside ilish (or hilsa), the national fish of Bangladesh and panta bhat or fermented rice.
Apart from the well-known varieties of bhorta, there are also lip smackingly sour, hot and sweet — tok jhal mishti in Bengali — bhortas, which are also known as makha. In England, my mother makes these using gooseberries and strawberries from our garden, mixing British flavours with Bangladeshi ones. Our ‘snack’ bhorta on holidays would be made with blackberries, muddled together with chilli, salt and coriander — a vibrant damson purple mess of tart and sweet that is reminiscent of jaam, a popular stone fruit in the subcontinent. . This adaptation of bhorta outside of Bangladesh speaks to the deep association people of Bangladeshi origin have with this category of foods.
Among the Bangladeshi diaspora, the tussle between traditional and the modern is an ever present one. Yet, bhorta has remained a firm part of traditional meals. Korai Kitchen in Jersey City, New York is a Bangladeshi restaurant run by mother-daughter duo Nur E Gulshan and Nur E Farhana. When visiting a couple of years ago, I was heartened to see a trio of bhortas displayed as part of their daily Bangladeshi offerings, testament to the fact this dish is a thread that binds the Bangladeshi diaspora. Nur E Farhana attributes this popularity to “the relative ease with which one can recreate the flavors of home through a bhorta.” In the United Kingdom, Brick Lane — or Banglatown as it is also known — houses a handful of small cafe-style eateries which mainly cater to local Bangladeshis, including foreign students and workers who miss the taste of traditional home cooking. Graam Bangla (or ‘Bangladeshi village’) on Brick Lane is known for its bhorta varieties such as aloo bhorta and shutki bhorta. At Feast and Mishti in neighbouring Whitechapel, the bhorta station offers a mouthwatering array of dishes, notably a very good taki maach or spotted snakehead fish bhorta.
Ultimately, food serves as a conduit to many things. Versatile and endlessly adaptable, bhorta provides an excellent primer to understanding Bangladeshi food. It is comfort food when unwell or recovering from a broken heart; social food when aunts and cousins gather together for a ‘bhorta party’; and the food of remembrance when nostalgia hits.
