Koshano Mach Recipe

This is the second Kosho Mach (slow cooked fish) recipe from Moni Dadi’s diary. The other one should be already available on our website. This is the only dish to have two different variations in Moni Dadi’s recipe diary, and we will never know why exactly Koshano Mach was the dish to get two different recipes. But there are enough differences between the two recipes to justify two different pages for them.

In the other recipe the coriander leaf, mustard seed, coriander and sliced red chili are blended together. Then the blend is fried. But in today’s recipe there are no instructions for blending them together, Dadi wrote about directly frying. But you can use a blended version of the spices. But some ingredients are different. The other dish used lemon juice, whilst in today’s recipe Dadi did use lemon juice but she added a tad bit of Amchoor too. Apart from that. Are there any other differences? To know that you will have to cook them yourself, and do let us know which one you like better.

Now before I go further, something I mentioned in the previous Koshano Mach recipe that I feel like I should mention today is that Koshano Mach is not a very popular recipe. You will not find many results for it online, most are just traditional fish curries or Macher Jhol. There are not many online re

cipes for Kosano Mach, especially the way Moni Dadi cooked them. The dish that is more popular, and what you will mostly find online, is Kosano Mangsho (slow cooked meat). Cooking red meat like beef or mutton in this process is much more common.

I have been translating Kosano as “slow cooking” in this article so far, and did so in the other recipe as well. I do not know if that is the exact translation, feel free to correct me. But slow cooking is the closest thing I can think of as Kosano. The process of cooking something over a long period on medium heat is roughly what we call Kosano. Since the cooking is done for a prolonged period, the gravy is much thicker in these types of dishes – the way I like it. You can make it more curry-like by adding more water, but the spicy thick gravy is the preferred flavor by most people.

The ick I had about the other Kosano Mach, and that is still present with this one is the use of coconut. Bangladeshi cuisine does not use coconut in curries, some rich dishes use coconut milk but that is about the extent of coconut’s presence in curries. I remember when I visited South India, they used coconut in everything. And for my coconut sensitive taste buds, that was not a good experience. Particularly after a long day, when I am craving a good meal but what did I get? Coconut flavored fish – totally not for me.

So while making this recipe, yes today I am the cook, I was careful about the amount of coconut I’m giving. And in our household, we are not used to eating fish curries without frying the fish beforehand. So even though Moni Dadi did not include lightly frying the fish in the recipe, my mother did fry the pieces.

Also, there was not any mustard at home so I added a little bit of Kashundi instead (under my mother’s supervision, or else it would’ve ended in a disaster). So this is a trick you can try as well.

The final dish tasted amazing. Koshano Mach usually is not made in our house, so it has a good change in pace as well. And the taste of coconut was not strong enough to be a nuisance to me, so double thumbs up for that.