Bengali Mochar Ghonto Recipe
There is a particular hour on the day of Kartik Puja when our whole lane in the village smelled of the same thing, and by the time I understood why, I was already old enough to be part of the reason. It was not incense, though plenty of that burned near the tulsi platform from before sunrise. It was mustard oil meeting turmeric, and under it, something greener, something that smelled faintly of rain on a banana leaf even on a day when it had not rained at all. That second smell belonged to only one house in seven along our lane, because not every household bothered with the labour of a whole mocha, the deep maroon flower of the banana tree, when the market sold easier things that same morning. Ours did, every single year, and by the time I was old enough to be trusted with a task, my hands had already learned more of the ritual than my mouth had words for.
I was seven the first time I was allowed to sit on the low wooden piri instead of being sent off to play with the other children whose mothers had chosen the shorter road that day. My grandfather woke before the crows properly did, somewhere close to four in the morning by the position of the moon, and by the time the rest of the household stirred, he was already back from the cowshed with the flower wrapped tight in a cotton gamchha so its sap would not stain the courtyard tiles on the walk in. He believed, as his father had told him, and as I now tell whoever will listen, that a mocha cut after nine in the morning turns bitter in the pot no matter how long you soak it afterward. I have never found this written in any printed cookbook. I have only ever heard it spoken, in that particular tone old Bengali farmers use when they are stating a fact of nature rather than offering an opinion that could be argued with.
What followed was not a task that ended by lunchtime. It stretched the whole day into evening and, on the years my mother also cooked the second batch for the family after the puja concluded, well into the night, so that by the time I finally went to sleep, my palms still carried the smell of mustard oil and my knees still ached from sitting cross legged on that piri since morning. I did not understand then that I was being handed something. I only knew that my legs hurt, my fingers were faintly stained, and I did not want to be anywhere else in the world.
Cut the flower before the crows wake fully, or the sun will have already begun to draw the bitterness up into it. That is what the old ones said, and no one in our house ever tested the theory by cutting one at noon. A saying carried down our lane, origin unrecorded, authority unquestioned
The Undressing of the Flower
What outsiders never understand about mocha is how much it resembles a person being undressed layer by layer to find the tender part hidden inside, and how long that undressing actually takes when it is done properly rather than rushed. Each maroon petal, called khol in our house though I have heard other villages call it different names, has to be peeled back and set aside one at a time until you reach the pale yellow fingers underneath, the florets, each one holding a hard little stick and a translucent scale that my grandmother called the flower's tongue. By the time we had worked through even a third of the bracts, the courtyard floor around us looked like the site of some small, deliberate storm, purple petals scattered in a widening ring while the morning sun climbed higher and the smell of turmeric water grew stronger in the brass bowl at my feet.
She never once wore gloves through any of it, not even in the years her joints ached badly enough that my mother begged her to sit this one out. She rubbed raw mustard oil into her palms first, working it into the creases of her fingers the way one might apply a balm before a long walk, and she made me do the same before she would let me touch a single petal. This was not vanity. The sap of the mocha blackens skin and clings under fingernails for days, and mustard oil, she said, gave the sap nothing to hold onto. My own first attempt at cleaning a mocha without oiled hands left my fingertips the colour of old tea stains for four days, visible enough that my school teacher asked if I had been dyeing cloth at home, and I never doubted her method again after that.
What almost no one outside a Bengali kitchen ever learns, and what I only understood properly the year I was finally trusted to work through an entire mocha on my own from start to end, is that not every part of the flower demands this same patient surgery. Deep inside, past all the maroon bracts and all the tender fingered florets, sits a tight, pale, cone shaped heart that my grandmother called the haad, the bone, or sometimes phool koli, the unopened bud of the flower. Most households, tired by the time they reach it, simply cut this core away and discard it along with the tougher outer skins, treating it as waste because it looks too dense and too plain to be worth the trouble. My grandmother never once threw hers away. She would slice it into discs so thin I could nearly see the light through them, discs with none of the fibrous stubbornness of the outer florets and none of their bitterness either, because this innermost part carries almost no tannin and needs no stamen removed, no scale peeled back, no soaking to guard against blackening. Sliced fine and dropped into the pot in its final quarter hour of cooking, it drank in the ginger and cumin faster than anything else in the kadai, and it was this, more than the coconut, more than the ghee, that gave our ghonto the soft, cohesive, almost velvety body my grandmother called makho makho, a texture with no single English word I have ever found to replace it.
Every finger of the outer flower had to give up its hard central stamen, the part my grandmother called the danda, and the pale scale wrapped around it, which she called kanchuli, the same word used for the blouse worn under a sari. I found that comparison strange as a child and beautiful as an adult, a flower undressed to its blouse before it can be cooked. If you leave even a few of these stamens behind, the whole pot turns faintly bitter, an astringency that sits at the back of the throat and tells everyone at the table, without a word being said, that whoever cleaned the mocha that day was in a hurry, or careless, or both.
Once the first boil was done and the pot had cooled enough to touch, there was one last hand technique before the florets ever met a spice, and it was the part my mother and aunts performed together rather than alone, sitting in a rough circle with the drained mocha piled in the middle. Each of them gathered a fistful of the boiled florets and squeezed it hard between both palms over the empty pot, wringing out the last of the water the way one wrings a wet cloth before hanging it to dry, because any dampness left behind at this stage would later thin the curry and rob it of the dense, gathered texture a good ghonto is judged by. There was no gadget for this in our kitchen, no sieve pressed flat with a spoon, only hands, and a rhythm to the squeezing that I could recognise blindfolded even now, having heard it every Kartik Puja of my childhood from somewhere just behind wherever I happened to be sitting.
The chopped florets went straight into a brass bowl of water with a pinch of turmeric and a few grains of salt, never left exposed to open air for more than a minute, because by the second minute the cut edges had already begun turning a dull grey that no amount of later cooking could fully hide. This kept the flesh from browning the way a cut apple browns, and it also began the slow work of pulling out whatever bitterness the stamens had left behind even after the most careful cleaning. Later I would learn that this is simply oxidation and tannin at work, the same chemistry that darkens a banana or blackens tea leaves left too long exposed. My grandmother had no word for chemistry. She had forty years of watching a bowl of water turn faintly pink by midmorning and knowing exactly what it meant for the taste of the evening meal.
It was only much later, long after her hands had grown too unsteady to hold a knife for a full mocha, that I learned from an uncle who had married into a family further west that the flower itself is not always the same plant twice over, and that this difference changes the entire method rather than merely the taste. The mocha from the Kanchkola, the everyday plantain banana whose bracts run a very deep, almost bruised purple, carries the strongest tannins of any variety, and this is the flower that absolutely must be boiled through in salted turmeric water with every trace of that dark liquor drained away, or the finished dish turns bitter and faintly black no matter how much sugar you add at the end. But the mocha from the Mortoman or Champa Kola, the sweeter table banana whose inner bracts run a pale, almost blushing pink, is a gentler creature altogether. The seasoned cooks in that family never boiled this one at all. They rubbed it instead with dry salt and turmeric and let it sit until it wept its own water, coaxing out just enough moisture to soften it while keeping every trace of its natural floral sweetness intact, a method our own household never used simply because the only banana tree behind our cowshed had always been the deep purple Kanchkola kind, planted by my great grandfather for its fruit rather than its flower, with the mocha treated as a fortunate secondary harvest rather than the point of planting it at all.
Buying the right flower in the first place was its own small skill, one my grandmother trusted almost no one else in the house to perform even after I had learned every other stage of the process. She always asked for what she called garbo mocha, the plumper, heavier headed flower that comes from a tree that has already fruited well, its inflorescence noticeably meatier and less fibrous than the thin, hurried blossoms cut early off a young or overworked tree. She would weigh it in her palm before agreeing to buy it, and more than once I watched her simply pinch off the tip of a single outer floret with her thumbnail and taste the raw sap on her tongue right there at the market stall, spitting it out a moment later if the bitterness sat too sharply, and paying without a second thought if it did not. No vendor ever seemed to mind this small ritual of hers. It was, I think, a language they both understood, one that had nothing to do with the price chalked onto a slate board and everything to do with two people who had spent decades judging the same vegetable by the same rough method.
Not every household in later years kept this same patience for the cleaning itself, and by the time I was in my teens, my mother had begun sending our mocha to the vegetable seller a full day ahead of when she needed it, asking him to peel and chop it there at his stall in exchange for a little extra paid on top of the usual price, a quiet arrangement common enough in Kolkata markets that no one thought to comment on it. My grandmother never once did this in her own kitchen, treating it almost as a small defeat, though she never said so out loud to my mother's face. She simply cleaned her own share of mocha a little faster that year, as if to prove a point that did not need proving to anyone but herself.
The Rustic Bowl Before the Ghonto Existed
My grandmother liked to remind us, usually somewhere around the third hour of cleaning when my patience had visibly begun to fray, that the elaborate spiced curry we were labouring over was itself a fairly late arrival in the life of this flower. Her own mother, who worked the family's rice fields rather than commanded a kitchen full of help, had grown up eating mocha in a form so plain it barely resembled what we were making. Small tender florets, gathered whatever the day allowed rather than selected for a festival, were tied loosely into a cotton potli and lowered straight into the same pot where the household's parboiled rice was already boiling, so that nothing in the kitchen was wasted and nothing required a second fire. Once the bundle had softened inside that starchy steam, it was untied and pounded directly on the sheel nora, the flat stone and its grinding pestle that every rural kitchen kept near the back door, mixed with nothing more than raw mustard oil, coarse crystals of sea salt, and a fistful of the fieriest green chillies the garden had produced that week.
This was mocha sheddho bhate, mashed and eaten with the day's plain rice by field hands and farming families who had no patience or spare ghee for elaborate spicing, and my grandmother spoke of it with an odd kind of reverence rather than embarrassment, as though this rougher dish were somehow more honest about what the flower actually tasted like before anyone dressed it up. She said her mother used to claim you could not truly know mocha until you had eaten it plain and slightly bitter and a little sweet all at once, without cardamom or cinnamon or fried coconut standing between your tongue and the plant itself. It was, she told me, only in the later era of the zamindars, the landowning gentry of Bengal, that the flower was pulled out of this rustic simplicity and dressed in whole crushed garam masala, pure ghee, and fried coconut, so that a dish once cooked from garden cuttings and leftover greens, what old Bengali cooking texts and household chronicles called chhyachra, was elevated into something fit for a landlord's dining hall and, eventually, for a festival morning like ours.
I have since read, in the kind of old religious and culinary writing that rarely makes its way into a modern recipe blog, that banana blossoms appear even in the medieval Mangalkavyas and in the dietary records kept around the life of Sri Chaitanya, the Chaitanya Charitamrita, not as a standalone delicacy worth naming on its own but folded quietly into the everyday chhyachra of a Bengali household kitchen centuries before anyone thought to garnish it with fried coconut at all. Knowing this changed the way I hear my grandmother's kitchen in memory. What felt to me, as a child, like an unbroken tradition handed down exactly as it always had been was, in truth, a dish that had already travelled from field to farmhouse to landlord's table to our own courtyard, picking up ghee and cardamom and status along the way, long before it ever reached my seven year old hands on that low wooden piri.
My great grandmother used to say you had not truly tasted mocha until you had eaten it plain, pounded on stone with nothing but oil, salt and green chilli, and that everything added after that was for pleasure rather than truth. As my grandmother remembered being told, and as she told me in turn
What the Smoke Told the Neighbours
By late morning, once the first boil had been drained and the courtyard smelled less of raw green sap and more of turmeric, a small crowd of aunts had usually gathered on our veranda, ostensibly to help grind spices but really to watch and comment on how quickly or slowly the cleaning had gone that year compared to the last. Kartik Puja in our part of Bengal was never a solitary festival confined to one household's kitchen. It arrived with oil lamps lit at dusk, with young boys carrying tal patar sepai, the palm leaf puppet soldiers sold only in that one week of the year from a single travelling vendor, and with an understanding that a proper household kitchen would be loud and busy from well before sunrise until long after the evening prayers had ended.
The particular perfume of mustard oil meeting cumin, bay leaf and grated ginger, released only once the actual cooking began sometime past midday, travelled further down the lane than any of us intended it to. Our neighbour two houses down, an old widow named Charubala whom everyone simply called Charu Pishi, used to say she could tell what day it was by which smell reached her window first each morning. On Kartik Puja, it was always ours, and she was not shy about following it either. More than once she appeared at our gate in the early afternoon with an empty steel bowl and a reason that had nothing to do with mocha, something about needing to borrow turmeric she clearly already had, or asking after my grandfather's aching knee, and she would linger by the kitchen door, chatting about nothing in particular, until my grandmother, laughing at the transparency of it, filled the bowl anyway and sent her home with more than she had come for.
This was not treated as charity by either of them. It was understood, unspoken but entirely settled, as a kind of tax the aroma itself owed the rest of the lane, and I remember running the bowl over myself more than once as the afternoon light slanted low, weaving between the other children still playing near the pond, proud in the particular way a child is proud of being trusted with something that smells better than anything else for a mile.
A house that cooks mocha on Kartik Puja and does not send a bowl to at least one neighbour has cooked it for nothing, my grandmother used to say, only half joking, while she was already filling a second bowl before I had finished eating from the first. Kitchen wisdom, repeated every year without fail
A Flower With Its Own Folklore
It took me years, well past the age I stopped needing a piri to sit at my grandmother's height, to learn that the banana plant itself carries weight far beyond the kitchen in Bengali households. In many villages, including ours, a banana tree stands in as a symbolic bride, kola bou, dressed in a red bordered sari and bathed at dawn during Durga Puja, worshipped as an incarnation of the goddess herself before the main idols are ever unveiled to the public. The plant that gives us mocha is, in some sense, never entirely a vegetable in Bengali imagination even on an ordinary day. It is also, quietly and without much fuss made of it, a small deity standing at the edge of the cowshed.
There is a belief, older than anyone in my family could trace to a single person or event, that a banana flower cut and cooked with a distracted or angry mind will refuse to soften properly no matter how long it sits over the fire. My grandmother took this seriously enough that if she and my grandfather had argued the night before a puja, she would quietly ask my mother or an aunt to do the actual cutting that following morning, half laughing about it, half not laughing at all, and never once explaining her reasoning out loud in front of the person she suspected of carrying leftover irritation into the kitchen. Whether this is superstition, or a kind of folk wisdom about how a hurried and irritated cook mishandles a delicate vegetable, or something else entirely that I am not equipped to name, I have never managed to decide with any confidence. I only know that I have eaten mocha cooked in a calm house and mocha cooked in a house still simmering with an unresolved argument from the night before, and I believed, every single time without exception, that I could taste the difference sitting at the very back of the dish.
There was one piece of household law I only learned by accident, when I once asked, as a teenager helping plan a cousin's wedding feast, why mochar ghonto never appeared anywhere on the long list of dishes being discussed for the reception. My aunt answered almost automatically, the way one answers a question so old it no longer needs thinking about, that mocha was not considered a dish for occasions meant to celebrate a beginning, weddings chief among them, nor for an annaprashan, a child's rice eating ceremony, because the flower itself was thought too closely tied to endings and to the quieter, more restrained kitchens of mourning and fasting to belong at a table meant for celebration. I have since heard this same rule repeated by families with no connection to ours at all, which tells me it was never a private superstition of one household but something closer to an unwritten regional custom, carried forward by exactly the kind of women who never wrote anything down because everyone around them already knew it.
In parts of East Bengal, families who migrated after Partition carried their own version of this flower and its stories with them across the border, and I have met women in Kolkata's old refugee colonies who still speak of niramish mochar ghonto, the strict vegetarian version cooked entirely without onion or garlic, as a dish specifically reserved for days of fasting or mourning, when a household deliberately avoided anything considered tamasik in nature. The same flower, cleaned by the same patient hand, cooked into the same dish by name, carrying an entirely different emotional weight depending on which side of the river a family's grandmother happened to have been born.
The Secret Held in the Second Pan
Every family that cooks mochar ghonto believes it holds one secret the others do not know, and ours, as far as I have ever been able to tell by comparing notes with cousins married into other households, was twofold rather than singular. The first was fried coconut. Not the raw grated coconut most recipes call for, stirred in soft and sweet near the end, but coconut slivers fried separately in a spoon of ghee, in a small kadai kept apart from the main pot entirely, until they turned the colour of old gold and gave off a smell closer to roasted nuts than to fruit. My grandmother folded this in only in the final two minutes, along with the bhaja moshla, a dry roasted mix of cumin and dried red chilli ground fine and kept in a tin with a tight lid that lived on the topmost shelf, deliberately out of reach of anyone under the age of twelve, myself included for several more years than I appreciated at the time.
The second secret was one I only ever saw her use on years when the mocha itself had come out slightly wetter than usual, when the florets had held onto more water than the boil should have left behind. In those years, towards the very end of the slow braising she called koshano, she would stir in a small splash of raw rice paste, chaal bata, ground fine on the same sheel nora used for grinding spices, or failing that a spoon of dry roasted rice flour dissolved first in a little water. Stirred through the pot over low heat, this thickened and gathered the loose juices into something cohesive rather than watery, binding the florets and the potato and the spice into one unified, unctuous mass without ever tipping the dish into an actual paste. She called this aator dewa, giving it a binding, and she used it so quietly and so rarely that I did not even know it had a name of its own until I was well into adulthood and asked her directly why some years the ghonto held together more richly than others despite using what looked, to my eye, like exactly the same ingredients.
There was also, tied up in all of this, a quiet and mostly good natured disagreement that ran through both sides of my family for as long as I can remember. My grandmother's own family were Ghoti, from the western side of undivided Bengal, and she had grown up hearing certain purist elders in that lineage insist that potato in mochar ghonto was an adulteration, a lazy shortcut that masked the delicate bite of the flower rather than complementing it. Those elders cooked their mocha instead with a handful of soaked, fragrant Gobindobhog rice added straight into the tempering, so that as the steamed blossom released its own moisture, the short grained rice slowly cooked inside that spiced liquid, lending its starch and its perfume to the dish without a single cube of potato anywhere in the pot. My grandfather's side, by contrast, had crossed over from the eastern districts after Partition and had never cooked mocha any other way than with potato, minced almost fine enough to dissolve, precisely because in the crowded, uncertain kitchens of a resettled family, potato stretched a smaller quantity of mocha into a meal that could feed more mouths. Our own household kept my grandfather's potato, out of practicality as much as loyalty, though my grandmother would occasionally, on a quiet non festival afternoon with no one else watching, cook a small private pot the Gobindobhog way just to remind her own hands what her mother's kitchen had tasted like.
Further east and south of us, in the older villages of the Rarh region around Bankura and Birbhum where my father's cousins still keep land, the household secret took yet another shape entirely. In place of fried coconut, or sometimes alongside it in leaner years, those kitchens folded in matar dal er bori, sun dried lentil dumplings crushed roughly by hand and tossed into the pot only at the very last moment so they retained a distinct, stubborn crunch against the otherwise soft blossom. In the stricter Vaishnavite households among them, where coconut fat was avoided altogether for reasons of religious discipline rather than taste, cooks would instead crumble a piece of roasted papad into the resting pot just before serving, chasing the same crunch and the same contrast of texture through an entirely different ingredient. I did not grow up eating either version at home, but I have eaten both at a cousin's table during a visit one Kartik, and I understood immediately why each family defends its own method as the only correct one.
A ghonto that is served the moment it leaves the flame has not finished cooking. It finishes in the five minutes you make people wait for it, and that waiting is part of the recipe whether anyone admits it or not. My grandmother, every single Kartik Puja evening
Two Kitchens Under One Flower
Our household kept both versions of this dish alive across the same single day, and this too taught me something about how Bengali cooking bends around belief rather than breaking under it. On the puja day itself, through the whole stretch of morning and afternoon I have already described, the mocha was cooked niramish, entirely vegetarian, without onion or garlic, its richness built instead from ginger, ghee and that fried coconut, because the kitchen that morning was treated as an extension of the ritual space itself and nothing considered impure was allowed near the pot. But the evening after, once the puja had concluded, once the lamps had been carried down together to float on the pond and the last of the tal patar sepai had been tucked under someone's arm for the walk home, my mother would often light a second, smaller flame and cook a second small batch with a handful of tiny river prawns folded in, what we called mocha chingri, a dish reserved for family rather than for offering, cooked well into the hours when the courtyard had finally gone quiet and only the family itself remained awake around it.
Watching both versions made in the same kitchen within a single stretched day taught me that one recipe can hold two entirely different moods depending only on the hour and the company. The niramish version, eaten at midday with the whole extended household still in its puja clothes, felt devotional, almost silent, usually served with plain rice and a wedge of lemon and very little conversation over it. The chingri version, eaten well after dark with the lamps down to their last oil and only immediate family left at the table, was loud, shared with laughter over the day's puja gossip, the prawns adding a briny sweetness the vegetarian version never had and, frankly, was never trying to have in the first place.
In households I have since visited far outside Bengal, in cities where a fresh mocha is nearly impossible to find on any ordinary market day, cooks have told me they now rely on the brined banana blossom sold in cans at South Asian grocers, usually packed for entirely different Southeast Asian cuisines but perfectly workable here with one adjustment. Rinse it thoroughly under running water to carry away the packing brine, and shorten the boiling time by roughly half, since it arrives already considerably softened by the canning process itself. It will never carry quite the same bitterness to fight against, and therefore never quite the same small victory once that bitterness is tamed, but it remains a fair and honest substitute for anyone living far from a banana tree of their own.
Mochar Ghonto
Bengali banana blossom curry, the niramish way, as cooked in our kitchen on Kartik Puja
What you will need
- 1 large banana blossom, cleaned and finely chopped (about 3 cups), including the inner core (haad) sliced thin
- 1 medium potato, peeled and very finely cubed, or 2 tablespoons soaked Gobindobhog rice for the potato free version
- 3 tablespoons mustard oil, plus 1 teaspoon for cleaning hands
- 1 tablespoon ghee, divided
- 2 dried bay leaves
- 1 teaspoon cumin seeds
- 2 dried red chillies
- 1 tablespoon grated ginger
- 2 green chillies, slit
- 1 teaspoon turmeric powder, divided
- half teaspoon red chilli powder
- quarter cup grated coconut, fried separately in a teaspoon of ghee
- half teaspoon roasted cumin and dried chilli powder, ground fine (bhaja moshla)
- quarter teaspoon garam masala powder
- 1 teaspoon raw rice paste or roasted rice flour mixed with water, optional, for binding (aator)
- 1 teaspoon sugar
- salt to taste
How it comes together
- Rub a little mustard oil into your palms before touching the banana blossom, then peel away the outer petals until you reach the pale florets. Pull out the hard central stamen and the translucent scale from every single floret and discard them. Set aside the tight inner core, the haad, and slice it into thin discs. It needs no cleaning beyond a rinse.
- Chop the cleaned outer florets finely and drop them straight into a bowl of water mixed with half the turmeric and a pinch of salt so they do not blacken while you work.
- Drain the florets, then boil them in fresh water with a pinch of salt for about ten minutes until just tender. Drain completely and set aside. Discard this boiling water rather than reusing it, since it carries away the sharpest bitterness.
- Heat the mustard oil in a heavy kadai until it shimmers. Add the bay leaves, cumin seeds and dried red chillies and let them crackle for a few seconds.
- Add the finely cubed potato, or the soaked rice if using the potato free version, with the remaining turmeric and a little salt, and fry over medium heat until fragrant.
- Stir in the grated ginger and green chillies and cook for a minute until the raw smell fades.
- Add the boiled banana blossom, red chilli powder, sugar and salt. Mix well and cook uncovered on low heat for about fifteen minutes, stirring occasionally.
- Add the sliced inner core in the final ten minutes of cooking, along with the rice paste or rice flour if you are using it for binding, and continue cooking until the mixture dries out and gathers into a cohesive mass rather than sitting loose and separate.
- In a separate small pan, fry the grated coconut in a teaspoon of ghee until it turns golden and fragrant.
- Fold the fried coconut, bhaja moshla and garam masala into the curry along with the remaining ghee. Stir for two minutes on low heat and then turn off the flame.
- Cover the pan and let the ghonto rest, undisturbed, for five full minutes before serving with hot steamed rice.
For the prawn version cooked the evening after puja, add a handful of small cleaned river prawns along with the boiled banana blossom in step seven, and reduce the sugar slightly since the prawns bring their own sweetness.
Using canned or brined banana blossom instead of fresh: rinse it under running water for a full minute to remove all trace of brine, then reduce the boiling time in step three to about five minutes, since it will already be considerably softer than the fresh flower.
For a crunchier finish in the Rarh style, fold in a small handful of roughly crushed sun dried lentil dumplings, bori, fried separately, or a crumbled roasted papad, right at the very end alongside the coconut.
When choosing a blossom at the market, look for a heavier, plumper head rather than a thin, hurried one, and if the seller allows it, pinch off a sliver of an outer floret and taste the raw sap. A sharp, lingering bitterness is a sign to choose a different flower.
After boiling, gather the drained florets in your fist and squeeze firmly over the pot to wring out every last trace of water before they meet the spices. A curry that begins dry gathers far better than one that begins damp.
If your blossom came out watery after boiling, stir in the optional rice paste or roasted rice flour paste in step eight to bring the dish together into one cohesive mass rather than a loose, separated curry.
Serve with plain steamed rice, a wedge of lemon and, if the meal calls for something more, a bowl of thin dal alongside.
What Stays After the Lamps Go Out
Kartik Puja in our village always ended quietly, unlike the louder festivals that came before and after it in the calendar. The lamps floated down at the pond sometime near ten at night, the tal patar sepai were tucked away in a trunk for another year, and the courtyard emptied out slowly, family by family, until only ours and the smell of that morning's mocha remained. That smell lingered in the kitchen far longer than the festival itself, caught in the folds of the curtain, in the wood of the chopping board, in the memory of anyone who had spent the whole day inside its work rather than merely eating what came out of it at the end.
I cook mochar ghonto now in a kitchen far from that courtyard, in a city where banana blossoms have to be specially requested from a vegetable seller who keeps them under the counter for regulars who still ask. I still oil my palms before I touch the flower. I still discard every stamen with the same stubbornness my grandmother had, and I still slice the inner core thin rather than throw it away, because it took me thirty years to learn that this part existed at all and I have no intention of wasting the lesson now. I still, without fail, let the pot rest five minutes before I lift the lid, and I still think, every single time I do, of a low wooden piri, a brass bowl of turmeric water, and an entire day that somehow managed to feel both endless and far too short at once.
I have tasted this curry in Chennai..never tried making it..
Looks delicious.
Me encanta. Plátano al curry. Tendré que probar.
Un saludo.
Juan Carlos
hi kalyan, you said the pain goes after it's tasted... meaning delicious but sure is a tedious process... so...when i am free and mentally prepared to do a complex recipe, i will try this yummy dish.
never seen this before. thanks and have a nice day dear
I don't think I've ever had banana blossom before, but I'd love to try it. Labor-intensive recipes are usually so rewarding.
Un curry qui semble délicieux. Je note la recette.
A bientôt