Samar Halarnkar: Bombay duck tales from my mum's kitchen

Delicacies lend themselves to great stories.

In Japan, they prize fugu, the poisonous puffer fish, from which specially trained chefs must cut away organs imbued with a potent neurotoxin. In Italy and France, they seek the truffle, the black mushroom sniffed out underground by dogs (and traditionally, pigs).

My favourite story comes from Iceland, where hákarl, fermented Greenland shark, is never eaten fresh because of its high concentrations of urea and other toxins. It is cut into pieces, buried or placed in a container and allowed to ferment for several weeks or months, after which it is dug up, cut smaller and hung to dry for several months. Then, it’s safe to eat—if you can cope with its famously ammonia-like aroma.

When I read about the mixed emotions hákarl’s aroma generates, I could relate because the Halarnkars, too, love a smell that for centuries has driven those not accustomed to it to gag in horror. I refer, of course, to dried or drying Bombay duck, or bombil, the gelatinous lizardfish so beloved by us and our ilk on the west coast.

I’ve recently been reading In the Beginning There Was Bombay Duck, Pronoti Datta’s evocative food history of Mumbai, which revealed more to me about our beloved delicacy. But first, the aroma. Datta writes that British nostrils, arriving in the mid-17th century, were “stunned with the miasma that covered the island”.

That pong came from bombil, which the British called bummaloes. Datta quotes James Douglas, a former sheriff of Bombay (now Mumbai), complaining in 1893 about the “dirt and stench”, an “overpowering odour of fish and fish oil, Bummaloes here, there and everywhere”.

I have written previously about my family’s experiments with dried bombil, and how my wife was stunned when she first smelt it being tossed up for lunch in Delhi, a substitute for the real thing, which does not travel well. To her credit, she’s tolerated it all for a quarter century. She’s relieved that I rarely cook dried bombil now because, every now and then, the local fishmonger offers fresh Bombay duck, excitedly calling my mother when it arrives.

Bombil is notoriously delicate and soft. An 1863 ethnography of Bombay, quoted in Datta’s book, attributes its spineless provenance to a tale about the bombil’s refusal, among all fish, to help Lord Rama build a bridge to Lanka. It fell into Mumbai Bay when an enraged Rama twisted it and threw it away. “From that time on, its bones have been crushed and it has become soft,” Datta quotes Govind Narayan. “Devoid of a backbone, it is as soft as cotton when fresh!!!”

Indeed, you barely have to chew. You can gently swirl a bombil in your mouth, let its aroma wash over your palate and swallow.

My mother usually calls me over when she has bombil, which we have had quite often this monsoon. When she was a child, she says, it was the only fish available during the rains, so they ate it every day.

“We didn’t much like it then, it became too much,” she tells me. “Now, we treasure it so much. The ones we ate then were so fat and big. The ones here are so skinny looking.”

That explains her obsession with their size when her local fishmonger has them. “Bada hai kya?” she always asks, knowing they probably will not be large but hoping anyway. She usually marinates them with red chilli, turmeric and salt, then fries—or lately, air-fries—them. Sometimes, she makes bombil bhoozana, tossed with green chillies, ginger, garlic and grated coconut.

I ask her about her memories of how the fish was eaten. She remembers her mother using the bhoozana masala to coat and cook potatoes, cut like fried chips, then tossing bombil in at the end. Bombil, you must remember, cooks in a jiffy, 5 minutes at most.

She recalls bombil with a green masala and bombil bhajiyas, one fish cut into two, dipped in rice flour and semolina and fried crisp. “Your grandfather used to enjoy it with his drink,” she says.

Last week, I cooked bombil for the first time in my house. I was bored with the usual fried and air-fried versions, and remembered a curry at my mother’s house. I tried it, keeping in mind her warning that it cooks quickly.

The aroma of fresh bombil is dramatically opposite to the stink it raises when dried. Fresh, it has almost no smell, but when it emerged from the curry it was quite delectable. We ate it with sannas—the soft, fermented Mangalorean, idli-like rice cakes—and rice, and felt as light as when I started lunch.

BOMBAY DUCK CURRY

Serves 4

Ingredients

750g fresh Bombay duck

7-8 kokums, soaked in 2 tsp warm water

4 tsp red-chilli or Kashmiri-chilli powder

1 tsp turmeric powder

1 can coconut milk (or fresh milk from 1 coconut)

8 curry leaves

1 green chilli, sliced in two

3 tsp finely chopped garlic

2 tsp oil

Salt to taste

Method

Cover the Bombay duck with a plate and place a weight on it for at least 30 minutes, so the water is pressed out. Marinate the fish in 2 tsp Kashmiri chilli powder, salt and 1 tsp turmeric powder. Set aside for an hour.

Dissolve the remaining chilli powder and turmeric in a little water.

Heat oil in a pan over medium heat. Add curry leaves and green chilli. When they splutter, add garlic and sauté lightly. Pour in the dissolved chilli and turmeric and sauté for 30 seconds. When the water begins to evaporate, add coconut milk and the kokum with its water.

When the milk starts to bubble, gently slide in the fish. Reduce the heat and cook for 5 minutes, swirling the fish occasionally. Take off the heat and serve hot with rice, sannas or appams.

Our Daily Bread is a column on easy, inventive cooking. Samar Halarnkar (@samar11) is the author of The Married Man’s Guide to Creative Cooking—And Other Dubious Adventures.