Shorshe ilish Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Shorshe ilish is hilsa (ilish in Bengali), a river fish, braised gently in a paste of ground mustard seed. Its home is Bengal, the alluvial delta laid down by the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, which spans what is now the Indian state of West Bengal and Bangladesh. As a household dish it seems to have settled in broadly between the early modern and modern periods, from the eighteenth into the nineteenth century. It is indispensable at festive meals such as Jamai Shashthi, a fish dish rooted deep in the place.

Hilsa is a fish long rooted in this land. In the rains it runs up from the sea into the rivers to spawn, and its rich, oily flesh has long graced Bengali tables. Classical Sanskrit lexicons list its name, Ilīśa, from early on. Jimutavahana's twelfth-century Kalaviveka records that fried dishes made with hilsa and its fat were already relished in Bengal, and the Manasollasa, a cookery compendium of the same century, sets down as many as thirty-five kinds of fish and how they were cooked. Bengali verse epics such as the late-fifteenth-century Manasamangal and the early-eighteenth-century Annadamangal describe the fish feasts of weddings and festivals, and they name ilish.

Mustard, the other main ingredient, is likewise a crop of long standing in Bengal. Its cultivation on the subcontinent goes back a very long way, and grown in the fields of the delta it was indispensable in the local kitchen, both as an oil and as a paste for seasoning. Mustard preparations such as sarshe and kasundi are recorded in early modern Bengali writing. Mukundaram's sixteenth-century Chandimangal sets down countless fried fish, along with mustard leaves and shoots as food, with no hint of a foreign origin. It suggests that by then eating fish and using mustard were already woven into everyday life here.

The flavour of the dish comes from the technique of simmering fish in mustard paste. The seed is ground with water, and its sharp heat and slight bitterness are worked into the fish, which is then cooked over low heat, almost steamed. Mustard goes on not as an oil but as a ground paste that coats the fish, and this distinctly Bengali handling gives a thick, fragrant dish quite unlike an ordinary soupy fish curry. In the preparations called bhapa (steamed) and jhol (in broth), the sauce reduces as it takes up the fat of the fish. Hilsa and mustard were both at hand early, but the mustard braise as a style appears clearly in writing later than the records of its ingredients, and hilsa cooked in this sauce seems to have taken root as a household staple between the early modern and modern periods.

Built around hilsa and mustard, the dish is a food heritage shared by Bengalis in both India and Bangladesh, and it still comes to the table in the monsoon season and at festivals. Some see it and macher jhol, a river-fish curry in thin broth, as sister dishes grown from the same fish-eating culture of the delta.

Two views of where shorshe ilish came from have long been told side by side: that it grew out of local eating habits, and that it was born when the spice culture of Mughal and Islamic rule blended in. The second, which links lavish spicing to an incoming court culture, is a pleasing story, and some popular books, restaurants, and food blogs like to tell it.

But the roots of fish-eating in Bengal go much deeper than the arrival of any court. Mustard has long been grown on the subcontinent, and the name of hilsa, Ilīśa, appears in classical Sanskrit lexicons. Hilsa and its fat already turn up as a favourite local food in Jimutavahana's twelfth-century Kalaviveka, four centuries before the Mughals entered India. According to a study of the Manasollasa, a cookery text from around the same time, thirty-five kinds of fish and their preparation had already been written down. Bengali verse epics from the late fifteenth to the eighteenth century describe wedding fish feasts and ilish, as well as mustard preparations such as sarshe and kasundi, and the sixteenth-century Chandimangal includes countless fried fish and mustard leaves and shoots, set down as ordinary local food with no foreign origin attached.

Meanwhile, a food-history essay that traces Bengali cuisine across its whole history explicitly limits the contribution of Islamic rule to items such as watermelon, pomegranate, pulao, biryani, kebab, kofta, and kaliya, and does not count fish curry among them. The Mughal influence on Bengali cooking arrived in the eighteenth century as the Mughlai style of meat cookery, with onion, garlic, and rich spices, and it is described as a current separate from the mustard-steamed fish of shorshe and bhapa. Hilsa itself was served at Mughal feasts, but that tells us the fish reached the court's table; it says nothing about where the style of cooking it in mustard paste came from.

There is also a tradition tied to the army of Emperor Akbar, which holds that cooking fish in mustard oil was a technique brought to Bengal by Punjabi soldiers who marched with him. Yet classical Bengali writing of the sixteenth century records chital fish dressed in mustard oil as a local dish. The technique existed independently within the land, and the account that traces it to a single source in foreign soldiers does not hold.

Still, what the Chandimangal describes is fried fish and mustard leaves and shoots. When the style of simmering fish in mustard paste first appears in writing, and how it diverged between eastern and western Bengal, are questions that remain open. The dish is thought to have taken shape slowly, as an anonymous folk dish with no particular inventor and no founding year, in Bengali homes that had hilsa and mustard at hand. The story that it came down from the court has been set aside, but how far foreign elements found their way into it is still unsettled.