Bhapa Chingri Recipe: 

Bhapa Chingri is a prawn dish that is not meant for a wedding banquet, it’s a simple house dish. But being made with prawns, it still gets more societal prestige as a dish in Bengali culture. So Bhapa Chingri is a mainstay in Bengali house parties or dawats.

The translation for Bhapa Chingri is Steamed Prawn. But a translation of a name, especially when it comes to food, fails to capture the essence of the original word. But this time the translation draws a pretty accurate picture. Bhapa Chingri requires no “active cooking”, as you can see in the recipe, the prawn is cooked in a pressure cooker.

As a Bengali, the item I most closely associate with the word Bhapa is Bhapa Pitha. Bhapa Pitha is a Bengali traditional rice cake or pitha. I dislike calling pithas cakes because I think it’s an inaccurate description, that is made by steaming. Moni Dadi has a recipe for Bhapa Pitha if this is your first time hearing about it. And if you already know about Bhapa Pitha then you know that the word Bhapa is the only thing common between it and Bhapa Chingri. Both are made by some sort of steaming process but the instruments and ingredients used are different. And there’s also the obvious difference of the two being completely different types of food, and are completely unrelated to each other. But being a Bengali, I had to give a shout-out to Bhapa Pitha, the king of Bengali pithas, because I saw the word Bhapa.

Now to talk about the Chingri in Bhapa Chingri. Chingri is an umbrella term that represents both prawn and shrimp. There are specific names for prawn and shrimp but most of the population refers to them as Chingri, differentiating only by their size. So this could create confusion to anyone unfamiliar with Bhapa Chingri, should it be made with shrimp or prawn or will either work? The answer is prawn, as you might have guessed. And prawn cannot be substituted with shrimp for the dish. So the Chinrgi in the name of the dish only represents prawn. Even amongst prawns, tiger prawn is the preferred choice.

The use of prawn gives the dish a kind of societal prestige, as I already said. In other recipes of Moni Dadi I have pointed out that some dishes are for special occasions, Bhapa Chingri is one of them. It is simply because prawn is expensive and most Bengali people do not have access to prawn whenever they want. So in the average household prawn is saved for special dinners. That being said, Bhapa Chingri is not a dish you will find in wedding events or such. The prawn dish of choice for such occasions is Chingrir Malaikari, another prawn based dish that has rich texture and is more suitable for eating with polao.

Bhapa Chingri has a more rural Bangla soul to it. If prawn was more accessible to the general mass of Bangladesh, I think Bhapa Chingri would have been a staple food in almost every household. Kind of like the presence shrimp based dishes have right now. But alas, even with a bucolic soul, Bhapa Chingri rarely gets the opportunity to please the rural people of Bangladesh because of its steep ingredients cost. This severely narrows down the audience for the dish: it’s a Bangla dish that most people cannot afford to eat without a special occasion but if the event is too special then the go to choice is Chingrir Malaikari, and not Bhapa Chingri. So even though Bhapa Chingri is a dish that you should be seeing in every household, in reality you will rarely see it. Even I cannot remember the last time I had Bhapa Chingri.

Nevertheless, I was excited to have Bhapa Chingri after a long time. While looking up the dish I found some recipes adding different spices from what we added. Today’s cook Shortcut Sokhina said you can experiment with different spices, poppy seed being one of them. But she wanted to follow the recipe to the t today. So much so that she added headless prawns, even though I asked her to keep the heads during dressing. But she did not agree. The dish turned out amazing, as expected, so I have no complaints about prawn heads.