Every Occasion Is Right For Luchi
Text and photographs by Priyadarshini Chatterjee
Making perfectly round, moon-like luchis is a prized skill in the Bengali kitchen. Here is a plate of freshly fried luchis with chholar dal.
“See Thamma, I rolled a luchi,” I said, holding out a thin, glossy disc of dough on my small palms. “Shabbash! This should puff up like a dhol (drum) in hot oil,” my grandmother said, in gleeful approval. Luchi – an unleavened, deep-fried, puffed bread made with maida (refined flour) and fat (ghee or oil) – is one of the crown jewels of Bengali cuisine. It was no mean feat for a six-year-old to roll a perfectly round luchi. Always prompt in dispensing the highest praise to her grandchildren, my grandmother called the others to take a look at what was definite proof of my precocity.
Things took a downward turn when I, emboldened by my grandmother’s hyperbolic praise, volunteered to demonstrate my newly discovered skill to the rest of the family. To my horror, I had a rebellion on my hands. Even though I huffed, puffed and toiled for what seemed like an eternity, the lechi (or pellet of dough) refused to take the desired form. A glistening white at first, it soon morphed into an unappetizing blob of turbid grey.
While my cousins sniggered, my grandmother matter-of-factly blamed the dough, and quickly turned everyone’s attention to the piping hot luchi and potato curry that had just arrived from the kitchen. I quietly snuck up to the terrace, with a couple of luchis rolled up with sugar, and spent the rest of the morning mulling over the fleeting nature of my serendipitous stardom.
Ever since, I have never been able to roll a perfectly round luchi. “What’s in a shape? That which we call luchi, in any other shape would taste as good,” I argue in defence. However, in my heart, I have always known that in an ideal gastronomic universe, it was quite disgraceful. For what’s a luchi that isn’t perfectly round – just like the full moon?
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Poets across time have compared the beauty of a beloved’s face to that of the moon. Some of Bengal’s greatest wordsmiths have drawn parallels between the luchi and the full moon with equal affection. Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, one of Bengal’s greatest litterateurs, wrote in his 1875 novel Kamalakanter Daptar – should the moon rise in the sky in the form of a luchi, the heart would transform into Rahu and rush to swallow it. According to Hindu mythology, eclipses happen when Rahu, the severed head of an asura (or demon), swallows the moon or the sun. Historian, writer and civil servant Romesh Chunder Dutt, on the other hand, mused that luchis, served on a silver platter surrounded by other delicacies, were akin to the full moon surrounded by constellations of stars. In a humorous song replete with reverent endearments befitting a beloved, 19th century playwright and theatre personality, Amritalal Basu wrote, “O dear luchi, you are revered in all three worlds.”
The Bengali literati, especially in the 19th and early 20th centuries, didn’t just wax rhapsodic on luchi’s gastronomic virtues. In fact, modern Bengali literature of the time is strewn with references to luchi as a token of domesticity and familial affection, a marker of socio-cultural hierarchies and most importantly, a metaphor for Bengaliness. What makes this particularly intriguing is how a humble wheat bread morphed into a cultural expression in the imagination of a rice-eating community. As the popular saying goes, it is fish and rice that makes Bengalis.
Luchis are also relished in other parts of India, but it is on the Bengali table that they occupy pride of place. Here is a plate of luchis with kosha mangsho.
Luchi is not exclusive to Bengal either. It is relished across Eastern India, made for special feasts in Himachal Pradesh and sold off street carts in the city of Amritsar in Punjab, especially during festivals. My mother-in-law tells me that the Amritsari luchis are massive in size. However, no community celebrates the luchi with as much zest as the rice-loving Bengali. Luchi’s ubiquity in the region’s literature is perhaps only surpassed by its iconicity in Bengali life. Be it festivals or fasts, wedding feasts or funeral meals, ritual offering to the gods or Sunday breakfast with the family, or simply the need to cheer up after a bad day at work — every occasion is ripe for luchi.
Usually, bread is served as an accompaniment for main dishes. On a Bengali table, however, luchi is the star (or moon) around which a meal is constructed. Luchi goes particularly well with sweet and spicy chholar dal — split Bengal gram cooked with fragrant whole spices and finished with raisins and fried coconut bits — which is sometimes referred to as luchir dal (or dal meant for luchi). Other accompaniments may include begun bhaja or deep-fried eggplant, or even spicy ghoogni (curried yellow peas). A Bengali rhyme recommends some sweet semolina and a little aloo dum, and ideally, some malai chamcham — spongy cylinders of chhana (or cottage cheese) soaked in sweetened milk — with phulko (or puffed) luchi. While phulko or puffed luchi, gravid with hot air, seems to get all the press, bashi or stale, deflated luchi, has a cult of its own. One of my great uncles was famous for his curious habit of eating bashi luchi mashed with milk and bananas for breakfast, almost daily.
The ultimate indulgence, most Bengalis will tell you, is luchi paired with quintessentially Bengali kosha mangsho, goat meat braised and slowly cooked with onions and spices. But real joy, perhaps, is warm, flaky luchi with jhola gud (liquid date palm jaggery) on a cold winter night. Personally, I like to pair my luchi with a simple potato curry tempered with nigella seeds and green chilies and some golden, syrup-soaked bonde (or deep fried, gram flour globules) – a combination often served for breakfast at Bengali weddings.
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It’s perhaps not a good idea to point out to a Bengali that luchi is rather similar to puri, a similar puffed bread typically made with atta or whole wheat flour instead of maida. Such an observation is likely to elicit annoyance, and some sarcasm laced with good old Bengali exceptionalism, and just a hint of colourism. “The chewy, dark-skinned puri has nothing on the light, delicate, soft yet flaky, dhabdhabe shada (or flawless white) luchi that dissolves in the mouth,” they will tell you.
The ideal luchi, puritans insist, must be perfectly round and pristine white — like the moon — and fashionably petite, no more than 3-4 inches in diameter. There’s also an unwritten rule that a luchi must be rolled in two and a half strokes. When it comes to luchi, appearance is just as important as its taste and texture. Kalyani Datta, in her book Thod Bodi Khada, writes how a blemish on a luchi would invariably incite the mother-in-law’s wrath. Others have compared a blemish on a luchi with a blot on a woman’s character. However, Datta also points out how the smaller, daintier, flawless luchi was more of an urban thing.
This single-minded preoccupation with the aesthetics of the luchi and its popularity, is perhaps closely linked to the construction of the urban Bengali middle class identity in renaissance Bengal of the 19th century, as being more sophisticated and respectable than the rest of the native population.
Food historian Utsa Ray writes in her essay Aestheticizing labour: an affective discourse of cooking in colonial Bengal, “In colonial Bengal, the project of modernity endowed the culture of food with enormous significance, and the act of cooking became gendered like never before…in the nineteenth-century Bengal, the business of cooking was caught up in a new rhetoric: a new façade for cooking became evident – the façade of the aesthetic, which was defined in affective terms and in the terms of art and educative principles.” Bengali women responded by turning mundane culinary rituals – such as cutting vegetables, making sweets and rolling paan (betel leaf) – into veritable artforms. Luchi was no exception.
Artfully prepared with premium ingredients like ghee and maida, something Bengalis held in high esteem, luchi fit right into this narrative of Bengali gentility and culinary sophistication. Incorporating luchi in their daily diet set the affluent, middle class Bengali of colonial Bengal apart from the rice-eating masses.
In her book, Datta writes about a delicious assortment of savoury snacks relished in Bengali homes – lentil stuffed fried flatbreads like kochuri, Radhaballavi and dalpuri; shingara (samosa), nimki (savoury fried dough) and more. But, she writes, “the simplest and the most beloved of all was luchi.” No meal in a typical middle class household was complete without luchi, which was eaten with everything from fried vegetables and curries, fish and meat to yoghurt, and even rabrior long-grained rice mashed up with milk. Large households, Datta tells us, often had an exclusive unaan(clay oven) for frying luchi. The fire in this oven never seemed to die, just like the flames of demon-king Ravana’s funeral pyre which, according to some Hindu beliefs, continues to burn to this day.
Prepared with premium ingredients and requiring a certain degree of skillfulness, luchis became a symbol of cultural sophistication among the Bengali middle class.
Contemporary cookbooks, on the other hand, discussed in detail the intricacies of making good luchi. In Bishweshwar Tarkalankar’s Pak Rajeshwar (1831), one of the earliest cookbooks to be published from Bengal at the behest of the Maharaja of Bardhaman (of the erstwhile zamindari estate in the state of West Bengal), the recipe for luchi or lochika comes with explicit instructions. The dough made of refined flour, clarified butter, curd and warm water, must be kneaded vigorously with fisted palms before being rolled into the shape of the moon and fried in ghee. Cookbook author Bipradas Mukherjee, in his 1904 book Mistanna Pak, also stressed the importance of kneading in making good luchi, as also the right amount of moyen or fat added to the dough. The book features recipes for luchi made with the flour of cassava or jackfruit seeds, stuffed with kheer or coconut, and stewed in sweetened milk to make a luscious paayesh.
The landed aristocracy of Bengal were just as effusive in their adoration for luchi. There are stories, shared by elders, of flamboyant zamindars who only ate the delicate, thin, upper crust of the luchi, discarding the slightly thicker base as crude, as a show of refined taste. Incidentally, the delicate upper layer of the luchi is also a treat for toothless toddlers in Bengali homes, ideally with a spoonful of sugar. An old Bengali folk rhyme compares sugar served on a plateful of luchi as being akin to a flash of lightning in the lap of clouds. On the other hand, the number of luchis a man could consume was often a demonstration of not only a strong stomach, but also oft-ridiculed Bengali machismo.
Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, Bengal’s most revered poet, throws some light on the Bengali man’s luchi-fortified masculinity in his poem Dharma Prachar (Preaching of Religion), a part of his 1890 poetry collection Manashi. The male protagonist, a self-proclaimed defender of Hinduism, demands luchi on returning home after helming an assault on a ‘saheb’, a European missionary on the streets. His blood still boiling with rage, he says he doesn't know what he would do in a fit of anger if he is not served luchi immediately. The man questions the virtue of an Aryan wife who deprives her husband, home from combat, the sanatan or tradition-bound combination of luchi and chhoka or curry. Such a wife, he says, will be suitably punished for failing in the wifely-duty of making luchi.
The modern Bengali’s luchi-fixation and unrestrained consumption attracted some criticism too. Hindu religious reformer and spiritual leader Swami Vivekananda, for instance, held fried food like luchi, among other things, responsible for the modern Bengali man’s struggle with diabetes and dyspepsia. As Ray points out in her book Culinary Culture in Colonial India, at least some of this concern stemmed from the general apprehension against food items that were not unique to the region or a part of the conventional Bengali diet. Despite their highest regard for Vivekananda, Bengalis of the time chose to ignore his reservations against luchi. Luchis continued to be made and consumed in preposterous numbers by the Bengali bhadralok.
Besides, as Mukherjee points out in Mistanna Pak, luchi’s curative virtues – especially effective against dysentery, arthritis and phlegm – were commended in ancient Ayurveda. Interestingly, according to some scholars, the earliest mention of what we now call luchi is found in an 11thcentury medical book titled Drabyagun written by eminent physician Chakrapani Dutta. The book mentions a fried bread made of fine wheat flour and ghee called shashkula, which is considered luchi’s ancient ancestor, and proof of the latter’s antiquity in the region.
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In rural Bengal, luchi was, and still is, more of a special treat. In his book Smritite Shekal, Jogendrakumar Chattopadhyay writes about rural feasts of yore. At these modest feasts, luchi was the star, served simply with a pumpkin curry, yoghurt and sandesh. At one particular wedding feast, Chattopadhyay writes, the only items served were luchi and a white, powder-like condiment that the author at first mistook for salt. Turns out, it was ground sugar. These luchis, as Datta points out, were larger and thicker, and referred to as ‘Bamnayi luchi’, perhaps after the Brahmin cooks who fried them.
In his book Choddo Shataker Bangali that explores life in late 19th and early 20th century Bengal, author Atul Sur writes about how luchi was a modern-day addition to feasts that traditionally served rice or the rustic and ancient phalaar – a mix of fruits, yoghurt, sweets and flattened or popped rice, served to Brahmins. Over time, luchi became a part of phalaar. But phalaar would be referred to as paka (pucca or cooked) if it featured luchi. In the 1854 book Kulin Kulsarvasya, playwright Ramnarayan Tarkaratna writes that the best kind of phalaar includes hot luchis fried in ghee, a couple of kachori, fries and curries and an assortment of sweetmeats.
According to caste diktats of the time, one could not eat rice served by those outside their caste, especially those lower in the caste hierarchy. However, everyone was allowed to eat rice in a Brahmin’s home. So, rice was served only at feasts in Brahmin homes, while others were forced to serve luchi. Wily Brahmins who abstained from eating rice in non-Brahmin homes to preserve caste purity, kept a little loophole in the form of luchi. As Ishwar Chandra Gupta, another literary stalwart of the time, wrote: When it comes to luchi, the Brahmins, consumed by greed, forget all about caste or purity. They eat as much as they can and then take just as much home.
Called chhada bandha, the tradition of tying up food into a bundle to carry home, was indispensable to rural feasts. The number was fixed at 16 luchis and 12 sandesh. It could be more or less depending on the host’s financial status. In his celebrated novel Pather Panchali, author Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay takes a dig at the Bengali Brahmin’s penchant for luchi. He observes how they seemed to have a fixed rate of paanch ganda (or 20 luchi) that they packed for home.
Brahmanical diktats also barred non-Brahmins from offering anna bhog or a ritualistic offering of cooked rice to the gods. In his essay Baunder Khadyaprem (Brahmins’ love for food), Ramkrishna Bhattacharya writes that the Brahmins proscribed the offering of cooked rice or bhaat and khichdi (rice and dal cooked together with spices). However, they approved the offering of godhumpishtak (wheat cakes) — or luchis by another name — and paramanna or rice kheer. When reminded that paramanna is essentially cooked rice, the Brahmin sophists reasoned that rice cooked in milk was permissible on account of the fact that it came from the sacred cow.
A few years ago, Tirthankar Deb, a member of Kolkata illustrious Shovabazar Rajbari aristocratic family, famous for their centuries-old Durga Puja celebrations, told me how at their family puja, the mother goddess is not offered anna bhog because they aren’t Brahmins. Instead, luchi and a vast array of other sweet and savoury items prepared by Brahmin confectioners are offered to the Gods. In another part of town, the Mitra family of Darjipara offers luchi and vegetables fried in ghee, without salt. In his essay, Bhattacharya calls out the inherent hypocrisy and caste politics at the root of such taboos. The logic is simple: eat ordinary khichuri with your own money, and the more luxurious luchi and kheer with another’s.
Luchi also appears in narratives of hunger, deprivation and discrimination. In Satyendra Nath Dutta’s poem Dorokha Ekadasi, the poet condemns the society’s high and mighty, who relish their luxurious meals of luchi and mangoes, while a young widow, forced to observe stringent fasts, suffers from hunger and thirst. Marxist poet Sukanta Bhattacharya, in his poem Purano Dhadha (Old Riddle), questions why the rich must feast on luchi and mishti (sweets) while the poor are left with potsherds. In another poem, Hey Maha Jiban (Oh Great Life), Bhattacharya writes that in a hungry land, the world is prosaic, not poetic. On a hungry stomach, he wagers, the full moon looks like a charred roti.
Nowadays, the cosmopolitan, health conscious Bengali too sees not the moon, but a burgeoning waistline in the roundness of a luchi. Pristine white luchis are also hard to come by – old timers say it’s a lost art. Finally conscious of the dark side of white, refined flour, Bengalis also tend to add some atta, perceived to be healthier, totheir luchi dough. When it comes to luchi, moderation is key. However, the Bengali heart still does a little jig at the very mention of it.
