Prawn Roast - "A Traditional Barbecue Recipe"
My mother is an exceptionally good cook. She has an amazing quality to transform a single item with less oil and minimum spices into a sumptuous one, but my father has a talent of artistic food. Remembering his childhood how naughty he was, I still can find a faint smile under his mustache They both are in the 80s now. This recipe was created by him when he was in his 12.
After coming back from school he used to go to the ponds that his family owned, both of which used to flood during the rainy season and a boat was required to communicate to and from the kitchen or the boithak khana (drawing room). The ponds were full of fishes and big-headed prawns. Baba liked to play hide and seek with the prawns. Generally the prawns were the last choice always at that time, because they had uncounted number of fresh water fishes. He regularly caught the galdas and nobody wanted to cook them. So he invented his own recipe.
Big galda’s have prominent veins so it could easily be removed. So many lemons were there on the trees and my grandmother’s hot mango pickle oil was there too. He used to clean the fish and rub them with salt and lemon. The prawns were put through one by one into the coconut leaf stick and then dipped into the mango pickle oil. He waited for his mother to leave the kitchen after her cooking had been done and he put all the sticks into the faint fire. Just after half an hour or so, he used to take those out and eat the delicious roasted prawn.
We used to be awed every time he made the prawns according to his creation. Actually even today we keep making the hot mango pickle oil for this recipe exclusively. We also make dry roasted kalojeera (onion seeds) garlic prawn vorta (paste) with those roasted prawn, all delicacies are best to eat with hot plain rice.