Feasting on Fridays: Dhaka’s rich breakfast traditions
The Friday menu, whether for breakfast or lunch, has always been a lavish affair for the people of Dhaka.
The bowl of cereal or a hard toast is swapped with hot parathas fried in ghee, julienned potatoes fries, spicy omelettes with cheese, and sweet semolina halwa, or perhaps, puffed-up luchis with aloo dum and dim er halwa (potato curry, and an egg dessert).
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. The most elaborate morning spread, in my opinion, is beef bhuna and thick laal atta roti that is spiced up with onions and chilli (brown flour savoury soft tortilla), and finished off with a hot cup of gur er cha (tea with molasses). Bengali families are spoilt for choices, and a well-planned, sumptuous home-cooked weekend breakfast is undeniably the best.
Then again, it is a Friday morning, and the lady of the house is equally entitled to stay in bed a little longer, with her tea. Getting all flustered with cooking is not exactly an ideal option to relax on a Friday morning.
So, if there isn't a rich breakfast at home, then the second-best option is going out for breakfast.
Dhaka has numerous lovely breakfast options. The posh cafes in Dhaka, like White Canary Café, North End Coffee Roasters, and Bistro E offer an elaborate English breakfast menu: sausages, eggs (fried, poached, or scrambled), grilled tomatoes, mushrooms, baked beans, marmalades, and buttered toasts and bread. My most sinful choice for such a breakfast is the soft brioche French toast with a seasonal fruity compote.
But for the Bengali Babus that we are, our quintessential nashta or breakfast is always from a local sweetmeat shop like Bismillah Misti Mukh & Bakery Ltd, Bonoful, or Muslim Sweets across the road.
The choice includes fresh seasonal vegetables mash or labra, tempered with dry chilli, fenugreek, cumin, mustard seed in mustard oil, and infused with an earthy depth of hing (asafoetida), served with hot paratha and roshogolla.
An alternative to this menu is the chunky vegetable stew with pea lentils cooked in clarified butter or ghee, and soft omelettes with lots of onions, green chilli, and mint, and a glass of chilled matha, a popular Bangladeshi yogurt-based drink.
The deep-fried luchi, mixed vegetable bhaji, and bhundia, a fun dessert of fried chickpea flour bubbles dipped in sugar syrup from the legendary Medina Mishtanna Bhandar in Lalbagh, have always been a crowd pleaser. This menu has been going strong for the last 50 years.
Sweetmeat breakfast has put Deshbandhu Sweetmeat, Alauddin Sweetmeat, and Medina Mishtanna Bhandar in the spotlight.
I remember walking down the quiet alley, early in the morning, from our house in Purana Paltan to the corner around the North-South road, where the legendary Maranchand sweetmeat shop was located. You could smell the hot parathas and labra from afar. Packed in brown paper bags, I used to walk back home with Mashi, our nanny.
On the way back, she would pick madhobilota flowers for me and collect a slab of home-churned butter, made by a single mother of four children, who was our neighbour. My father vouched for her products. At times, he would stop by her kitchen, on his way back home from work, to collect a pack of salted or sugared cchana or curdled milk. I just had to share this anecdote because Dhaka in the 70s was like a quaint suburb. And mornings were dreamy, pollution-free, and safe.
Anyway, coming back to Friday breakfast, I must add that from times gone by up until now, old Dhaka has remained a sought-after place for breakfast.
Haji'r biryani in Alauddin Road sees queues from 6:00am. Basically, it is a meal of beef tehari cooked in mustard oil, and their parcels are wrapped in a packet of dried jackfruit leaves. This is indeed legendary and till date, it remains so.
Chicken soup, the local version of white sauce broth with chicken pieces, bone marrow stew, or nihari and paya, is a legacy of old town's Mughal settlements, served with soft butter naan and oil-free parathas. These breakfast items are yet to be dethroned from our list of favourite breakfasts aside from a homely one.
However, dunking hot parathas, bakarkhani, and toast biscuits in a piping hot cup of sweet milk tea is still my all-time favourite Friday breakfast.
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