Featherback. A thin, silver fish with a marked row of dark spots running parallel to the anal fin. This is quite a bony fish but often pounded or scraped clean of the bones. It is used to make muittha.
Chnechki is one of many dishes similar to labra, where vegetables are simmered with a mildly spiced curry sauce and served with rice. It is likely to be made with aubergine (US: eggplant) and gourds of one kind or another, sweet potatoes and plantains and potatoes and probably flavoured with ginger and turmeric.
Usually a dish of vegetables, greens and stems with panch phoron (the Bengali equivalent of garam masala). Can be made with fish.
Chickpeas (US: garbanzo beans), Bengal gram, channa. Darker and smaller than the chickpeas generally available in the West.
Chom chom is a very popular dish in West Bengal, second only to rosogolla. Made with cottage cheese and sugar, these oval shaped sweets are reddish brown in colour. They have a denser texture than rosogolla. Sometimes dried milk can also be sprinkled over chom chom.
This is a misnomer left over from Anglo-India now meaning a sort of potato cake with primarily vegetables or a fish or meat stuffing, dipped in egg and breadcrumbs and fried. Siddharth Dasgupta tells me that you can get vegetable chops on trains with breakfast.
