My father was completing his PhD while my mother prepared for her Cambridge Assessment when my parents had my older brother and I in Glasgow, Scotland- hence the name @scottishcaramel. We moved back to Dhaka, Bangladesh soon after and I didn’t really embrace my Scottishness until I moved to Austin, Texas. When people (especially at bars) asked me where I was “from” (the typical question that people of colour get asked in America), I would reply, “Bangladesh (baa-ng-la-deysh)”. More often than not, the response would be a slight head tilt, light bulb moment, and finally a dismissive “Oh, like basically India”. Cue eye-roll from me, “No, I mean Bangladesh”. So to avoid having this infuriating exchange, I started telling people I was from Scotland. Watching them squirm to find a PC way to tell me that I was brown- like I already didn’t know that- became a favorite party trick of sorts. Bangladesh and my connection to it is the baseline of everything, even my cooking.
I come from a land that was colonised and reaped of all its natural bounty, a country that fought for independence, a country that fought for partition, a country that then fought for the right to speak its own mother tongue. Put through the sieve of political turmoil, Bangladesh survived and so did the ingredients, cooking traditions and techniques that were passed down from generation to generation.
But because of revolution and war, some of those unique culinary traditions fell through the cracks of history. Much of the food evolved due to either the influence or literal presence of the British, Persians, Indians, and Pakistanis. Bangladeshi cuisine is still trying to distinguish itself from Indian cuisine- even though it’s already very different to begin with just by the usage of seafood and mustard alone.
To me, food isn’t just food. Food is history, food is culture, and food is identity. Like Anthony Bourdain said, “Food is everything we are. It’s an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It’s inseparable from those from the get-go.”
And because food is so closely tied to heritage, I focus a lot on the decolonisation of food and recipes- especially those of Asian origin. The culinary world has long been led by people renaming borrowed ingredients and concepts from other cultures without showing respect or credit. I’m not claiming that one shouldn’t cook with ingredients not native to their land or culture- but when did a traditional Indian curry need to get stripped of its identity and renamed as a “spicy stew” for it to be marketable? It is the duty of a chef to explain to their audience where their ingredients or techniques are from.
