Food and Growing Up

I didn't grow up eating lots of poppy-seed (posto) curries. My mother wasn't especially fond of them, and would tell me, posto is more of a ghoti thing. Meaning, it's more of a food that belongs traditionally to the people who are from West Bengal than us, the bangals, who are originally from East Bengal(now Bangladesh). Bengali cuisine is not something one easily gets in US. In lots of ways, Bengali food doesn't share a lot of the characteristics of Punjabi food, which has come to be understood as the India food in US. It's not as spicy, less greasy, more flavorful. Spices are used more to season things rather than to blunt the original smell of the vegetables, fish or meat. It does frustrate me sometimes that I cannot walk into a Bengali restaurant and order the delicacies I have grown up eating. On the other hand, I do like the fact that Bengali food hasn't been assimilated into the mainstream of American food cultural, the commercial culinary tourism. Whenever I cook something Bengali, I feel as if I am cooking up a secret, which I can (and do) share with my loved friends and only loved friends here. Today I cooked posto-murgi (chicken with poppy seeds). It is not something I have had ever tasted while growing up. But I would consider this dish irrevocably Bengali--the phoron (throwing of whole spices into hot sizzling oil), the poppy-seed paste, adding a little bit of sugar for the whole dish to have a caramelized taint. It does make me think about what constitutes authenticity when it comes to food? How does one take into account the regional/local/familial variations? What do those variations reveal in terms of the social historical and political dynamics of things? I made it based on these two recipes here and here. The result was delicious. The poppy-seeds gave the chicken pieces a very different kind of texture.