The old dak bungalows have faded into history – but the Dak Bungalow Chicken is creeping into the menus of nondescript eateries and popping up on every other cookery site on the internet. A related item that has become ubiquitous at restaurants is the Railway Mutton Curry. Meant to evoke nostalgia, both have acquired almost mythical status because very few people are around who remember what these preparations were really like or how they truly tasted. So, restaurant owners, cookery show chefs and cookbook writers can get away with their own creative version of the original.
There is no problem with that. Because food is about memories. And when one has no past point of reference, it is cooking up the imagination. What makes food different from most other memories or flights of fancy is that it tingles all five senses including the taste buds. Very few thoughts can trigger the salivary glands as food does. So it does not quite matter if one has ever tasted the original Dak Bungalow Chicken or Railway Mutton Curry as long as it conjures up that feeling of time and space from an era gone by.
So where does one find the recipe of the authentic Dak Bungalow Chicken, if it exists at all? Dak bungalows as we know were government rest houses constructed along the postal routes for use by government officials for night halts on their official tours. In a way, they were the British Raj equivalent of caravanserais and predecessors of the modern day PWD rest houses. The dak bungalows were staffed by a chowkidar, who lived there with his family. A khansama would accompany a high ranking official. But for ordinary mortals the chowkidar doubled up as a cook, rushing up a homely meal with ingredients at hand. Country chicken was easy to procure as villagers often kept poultry. It would be prepared with basic spices over a wood fired chulha and served with dal, maybe a simple sabji of potato or some local greens, with rice or chapati.
With hundreds of dak bungalows dotted across the country, staffed by chowkidars or cooks from different regional and ethnic origins and local culinary preferences, it is hardly possible that there was a single standard recipe of Dak Bungalow Chicken even within specific geographies. But what was possibly the common thread running across all these places was the rustic style of cooking, the spices used, the way they were ground, chopped and mixed, the magic of woodfire and typical ingredients. Two other elements, I believe, must have added to the taste of the food for sure -- the ambience and, above all, hunger pangs built up by travel on horseback or ancient jalopies. These are difficult to create in any restaurant or, for that matter, in pressure cookers and non-stick pans in modern kitchens.
However, it would be disingenuous on my part to evade the questions of what in my book would constitute an honest Dak Bungalow Chicken. For starters, any recipe that recommends use of tomatoes should straightaway be classified as an imposter. By all accounts it is unlikely that any kind of souring agent was ever used in dak bungalow cooking -- not even vinegar or tamarind. The essential ingredients were red chillies and turmeric, not even cumin or jeera. I would suspect the red chillies and turmeric were added in powder form, as that would have been easier and cheaper for the chowkidar to keep in stock rather than whole red chillies and turmeric roots. In any case, even if whole spices were added they would be ground on stone along with garlic cloves and ginger - neither grated or mashed in a mixer. Onions would be roughly chopped (mind you - the taste of onion varies with every form of cutting) and I would rule out the use of garam masala except, perhaps, tej patta (bay leaves). Cardamom, cinnamon and cloves would not be common ingredients of those times and, in any case, too expensive for the poor chowkidar to stock, even if the guests reimbursed the costs. The medium of cooking would vary from place to place. But since dak bungalows were associated mainly with north India, one can assume mustard oil was the preferred medium. Finally, it was the temperature and the time taken for the cooking with the heart and soul of the cook that went into the preparation to see a happy guest and be rewarded with a generous bakshish that made it a special genre.
If slow cooking in small quantities was the key to Dak Bungalow Chicken, it was sheer scale that characterised the Railway Mutton Curry. First, a word about why mutton was the meat of choice rather than chicken. As this writer has mentioned in some earlier columns, large-scale farming of chicken started in India only with the advent of imported broiler poultry. Before that, goats were the common livestock and cheaper than chicken which was not easily available. Besides, chicken had some religious connotations too. However, one must hasten to add that the railways served chicken too. The Western meal in certain branches of the railway, like in the South where the catering services were run by Spencer’s & Co and the Bengal Nagpur Railway (BNR - now South Eastern Railways) which was well known for its food, served a mean chicken roast. Chicken curry was also available on order but at an additional cost over a standard non-vegetarian mutton thali meal.
The idea of standard Railway Mutton Curry is as much of a misnomer as the Dak Bungalow Chicken. This is because the food & beverages department was outsourced to contractors by different sections of the railways except BNR, as mentioned before, which ran its own catering division. Thus it was Spencer’s in the South, Kellner in the East and North and Brandon in the West. Needless to say, all of them had their own style of preparations and recipes catering to the taste of their primary clientele. The southern spices and cooking medium, usually coconut oil, would not appeal to the Northerners and the mustard oil based mutton curry would have been anathema for people from the South. What is commonly referred to as Railway Mutton Curry is, therefore, the North Indian variant of Kellner. I have tried to source the recipe of the Kellner curry through friends at senior positions in the Indian Railways without success. I managed to get hold of a collector’s edition on the Bengal Nagpur Railways with some effort but it did not have any of the recipes. After a good deal of research I have come to the conclusion that what is common between Railway Mutton and Dak Bungalow Chicken curries is the 'thin red gravy with oil floating on top'.
A hybrid of the two is the Fowl (Chicken) Curry served on Goalando steamers in Bangladesh cooked by the boatmen (khalasis). All Bengalis whose families hailed from East Bengal would have heard stories about its finger-licking taste from their parents or grandfathers. Alas, people in those days described food by taste and did not bother about asking the chef for recipes as people do nowadays when they go out to eat. There was also no system of recording recipes by the cooks and it was handed down from one generation to another. So what we have today are at best recreations from folklore.
My most vivid recollection of the Railway Mutton Curry is not from any train journey -- but at a highway restaurant in Asansol, West Bengal, called Atwals (belonging to the family of the well-known golfer). Arriving there famished as a child at lunchtime on long road trips with my parents in their little Morris Minor, it tasted nothing short of divine Amrit. Sometime back, a friend on a road trip in Maharashtra stopped by at a forest rest house and asked the housekeeper if he could prepare Chicken Dak Bungalow. The man replied he can make 'Saada Khana'. My friend got excited thinking he was talking of a white curry like Rezala or a Kerala Chicken Stew only to realise to his disappointment when dinner was served, the man had meant a simple meal of chapati, dal and sabji. Moral of the story -- Dak Bungalow Chicken need not always have chicken in it.
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(Sandip Ghose is an author and current affairs commentator. He tweets @SandipGhose.)