Goalondo Steamer Chicken Curry Recipe & History

Goalondo Steamer Curry, also called Steamer Chicken Curry or Goalando Steamer Chicken Curry is a dish that legends are made of.

This is officially the 50th post on my blog. To me this is perhaps the best way to pay tribute to a dish that originated in Bangladesh where once my forefathers lived, like millions of Bengalis in Bengal, Tripura and Assam today.

Whipping up this dish seeing the recipe below is very easy. However, a complete experience includes understanding the ethos of this dish that made it legendary.

Goalondo Steamer Chicken Curry History

During the pre-independence era, if you had to travel from Calcutta (now Kolkata, capital city of West Bengal, India) to Dacca (now Dhaka, capital of Bangladesh), you would have to first take a train to Goalondo. The train would start its onward journey at night from Sealdah and reach Goalondo early morning.

Goalondo was situated at the junction of the Padma and Brahmaputra. It had steamer services connecting to Narayanganj in Dhaka and Chandpur, Barisal, Sylhet, etc.

If you had to travel to Dhaka, you would need to take a steamer from Goalondo to Narayanganj in Dhaka.

The steamer from Goalondo to Narayanganj made an overnight journey. This meant that the boatmen had to cook and serve food onboard the steamer. The Muslim boatmen cooked a fowl curry with a handful of humble ingredients to serve the passengers.

The end result was a thin gravy that was extremely hot. The fowl curry was popular among the passengers who relished the thin and spicy gravy served with rice.

As the war broke out, the steamer was discontinued in 1964. The chicken curry served aboard the Goalondo steamer vanished into oblivion.

Pritha Sen gave it a new lease of life in the 21st century.

Rediscovering the Goalondo Steamer Chicken Curry

You can’t write about Goalondo Steamer Curry without mentioning Pritha Sen who is credited to have rediscovered the recipe and the dish that disappeared with the discontinuation of the Goalondo steamer service.

She traveled and researched the dish for three years and found that “it was cooked with eggs and potatoes”.

“There were other things I discovered en route — that the famed Smoked Hilsa or the Bhetki was born aboard these steamers, carried to the Raj Kitchens of Calcutta by the highly skilled Mog Barua cooks.”

Pritha Sen, culinary expert and food historian

In an article in Times of India, she writes that she had to talk to “generations who had traveled the route” to understand the look of the gravy and the taste of the Goalondo steamer curry.

She went through historical data from the Bengal Gazette, Imperial Gazeteer, Bengali literature, documents related to the Railways and the Joint Steamer Company.

From the research she found a common thread – the curry had a thin red gravy, with oil floating on top. It was fiery.

Further research, paired with whipping up the Goalondo chicken curry and having it tasted by travelers in the route ensured that it reached near perfection when she added dry shrimp paste to it.

Excited? Let’s whip up the legendary chicken curry served aboard the Goalondo steamers.

How Did The Boatmen Cook Steamer Chicken Curry? What Makes It Special?

No fanciness involved. The boatmen had to serve food to the hungry passengers for the overnight journey.

Large poultry farms did not exist during this period. People used fowls for their meals. Every steamer would have a shil-nora (Bengali flat mortar and pestle, also commonly used in Odisha).

The cook would crush the chilies, garlic, ginger on the shil-nora. Onions would be roughly chopped and potatoes quartered. Sometimes, they would also add in eggs.

However, the ingredient that lent the curry its magic was dry fish. This was ground to a paste using the same shil-nora.

Dried fish was commonly used in non-veg curries in dishes of Bangladesh and areas like Burma and Malaysia.

All these ingredients including the turmeric, salt and mustard oil was used to marinade the chicken pieces and allowed to rest for sometime while the cook and his help engaged in other stuff like getting the water for the curry, washing the rice and set it for cooking, etc.

To cook the Goalondo steamer curry, the boatmen used mustard oil.

The chicken would cook in its own juices. The cooks poured in additional water to ensure a thinner gravy to accommodate all the passengers.

The meat was fried for the first few minutes to help the meat develop a slight color and seal in the juices.

The chicken curry was served with rice and a pinch of salt on the side along with green chilly on passenger’s request.

This recipe has been created with broiler chicken, potatoes and a handful of ingredients commonly used for the dish.