Growing up in Calcutta, West Bengal, India, I was taught the Bengali tradition that cooking a feast is the most heartfelt way that family and friends can express their love for one another. Naturally, with food playing such a vital role in my life, I developed an appreciation for delicious foods. It also didn’t hurt that my mother was an exceptional cook, a skill that she passed onto my sisters. Needless to say, the eating was good in my household.
But growing up in a typical Bengali household meant that men did not cook. Most families either had chefs or the women did the cooking themselves. Consequently, until I arrived in the United States for Graduate School, I was a cooking neophyte. Faced with the unimaginable horrors of dorm food, I quickly realized that I had two options: learn to cook or starve. I chose the former.
Inexplicably, I became keenly interested in cooking, not just for my own survival but also to entertain friends and family. Soon I became rather proficient at cooking various delicacies, but my grasp on the skill was still tenuous. Then, twenty years ago a long visit from my sisters rapidly spurred my development as a chef. In the course of the several weeks that they stayed with me in California, I received a crash course on the finer arts of Bengali cooking. The education that I received at the hands of my sisters proved to be the genesis for the delicious Basu’s foods that you see before you today.
Basu is so talented that he can cook this great food with his eyes closed and both hands tied behind his back. He learned this in his freshman class in IIT. The previous sentence was a random check to see if you made this far into the FAQ. If you read this paragraph give yourself a gold star J.
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