Most of us probably have our own “snacks” story. Now for something, which arguably started its journey from côtelette, making its way – changing forms, mingling with local spices, cutlet is still bit underrated among the fried snacks. But whenever the word cutlet comes to my mind, I travel almost three decades back to my childhood days in New Alipore.
Amongst the bylanes of New Alipore towards Behala, on Raja Ram Mohan Roy Road, there used to a club Young Men’s Association and right on one corner of that, there used to be a hole in the wall shop, making chicken cutlets and vegetable chop. Every evening, a “dadu” ( an elderly gentleman) would open his shop and start frying these beauties and there would be long lines of people returning home from office, college kids or even school children like me.
The fancy stuff here was the Chicken Cutlet which used to be like a traditional cutlet – rectangular piece of chicken, marinated in spices and then egg washed with breadcrumbs and fried. But the unique element of this not-so-unique dish was that the end of cutlet used to have the bone with which one could almost hold and eat the cutlet like ice cream! Boy, what a childhood favorite was it. But with years, as I have grown out of that place, slowly this cutlet story also vanished into the annals of time.
Now there are days when my mind wanders through my childhood memories of food and I get a huge pangs to satiate that feeling with something similar. So then I ordered Chicken Cutlet from Calcutta Fries, the snacks delivery outlet of 6 Ballygunge Place and enjoyed a fulfilling evening snacks. Evenly spiced with cilantro being more prominent and tilting towards more spicy side of things, but it was a good thing to satisfy my memories of cutlets.
Decently priced at INR 110/- a piece, to me, it spoke about very good quality first.
What’s your cutlet story? 🙂
Honumans 