A Taste Of Winter: The Many Pleasures Of Sweet Bengali 'Peethay' Pancakes & Dumplings

The cold winter breeze of Bengal carries with it the warm smell of fresh molasses. As grains of rice ripen and turn golden on their buds, the harvest season arrives with all its bounties.

In rural Bengal, farmers celebrate the harvest season with 'nobanno' — the festival of new rice. Cattle are adorned with ornaments made from rice paddies. Children huddle around their grandmothers and aunts in the kitchen for a taste of 'peethay' — traditional Bengali sweet pancakes and dumplings made with the season's new rice flour and stuffed with grated coconut, condensed milk, and khoa filling.

These sweet rice flour pancakes and dumplings — called 'peethay' or 'peetha' in Bengali — are an essential part of Bengal's winter celebrations. Whenever I'd visit my mamabari — Bengali for mother's ancestral home — in Bankura as a child, I'd eagerly, but patiently, watch my grandmother make peethay for the children. She'd wake up in the blue hours of dawn, even on those chilly winter mornings, and prepare all the ingredients on the wood-fired oven in the open courtyard of the old house. She'd boil rice flour in a pot of water mixed with molasses, constantly stirring the pot until the dough reached a cake-batter consistency, adding more flour or water as required, then knead and roll the dough into discs stuffed with khoa kheer — thickened and dried whole milk sweetened with sugar, molasses, or jaggery. Finally, she'd steam them, or fry them in ghee, depending on what kind of peethay she was making.

The word 'peethay', itself a derivative of the old Bengali word 'pitha', originates from the Sanskrit word 'pishtaka' which refers to doughs of rice or other cereal crops cooked over fire. In tribal areas of the Chhota Nagpur plateau — which spans over parts of Bengal, Bihar, Odisha, Jharkhand, and Chhattisgarh — 'pitha/peetha' also refers to savoury pies stuffed with meat and seasonal vegetables.

Traditionally, these were fried or steamed rice flour pancakes and dumplings sweetened with honey, molasses, or jaggery — sugar wasn't invented in India until the Gupta period circa 350 CE — that were served to the Gods as ritual offerings during harvest festivals. Different kinds of peethay such as chakuli pitha, gokul pitha, gorgora pitha, pitha puli, and patishapta are still made much the same way in Bengal, Odisha, Jharkhand, Bihar — and Bangladesh — and remain as popular as ever.

Beyond our love for sweets, the sheer variety of peethay pancakes and dumplings made in this region represent the agrarian origins of society in the fertile crescent of the Ganges delta, where a good harvest calls for sweet celebration even today.

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