Potoler dolma may have started as an Armenian innovation but other Calcutta communities adopted it. Muslim cooks moving between Armenian, Anglo-Indian, Jewish and elite Muslim kitchens would have spread the technique.
When the Portuguese explorer Vasco Da Gama disembarked near Calicut in 1498, he inaugurated a new phase in history. The sea routes were opened up, and the Dutch, French, Danes, and British soon followed. The coastal enclaves they founded became hubs of cultural exchange. Their economic potential attracted many kinds of people, including merchant communities, from outside and within India. ‘Creolisation’ resulted. New, unexpected cultural products sprang up from this interaction between different languages, different gods, different ways of living, and different ways of cooking and preparing food.
What was cooking in creole India’s kucinis?
Kucini Tales is a five-part flash fiction series, based on research on creolised food histories of India: the results of cultural encounters within settlements on the Malabar, Konkan, and Coromandel coasts and Bengal’s Hooghly district, founded and fought over by the Portuguese, Dutch, French, Danish, and British. Communities remember memorable events through scenarios that repeat as dramatic stories or myths. Our kucini tales are mini-scenarios, that entertain you with food stories from Creole India.