Patishapta

Patishapta is a Bengali pitha made by placing a sweet filling on a thinly cooked crepe and rolling it up. It is popular in Bangladesh and in West Bengal, India, and it also appears on the table during Poush Sankranti, the winter harvest festival. The sweet aromas of coconut and cooked-down milk come from inside the thin wrapper.

Patishapta in Kolkata (2023, Salil Kumar Mukherjee / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0). The downscaled version from the source is used, with no changes to the content after retrieval.

Rolling a Sweet Filling in a Thin Crepe

In one method, wheat flour, rice flour, and semolina are mixed with milk and left to rest for a short time. The batter is poured thinly into a frying pan, and once it begins to set, the filling is laid on it in a long strip and the crepe is rolled up. The filling is grated coconut or concentrated milk solids cooked with sugar or date palm jaggery and scented with cardamom. Stirring it while driving off the moisture produces a soft filling that stays inside the rolled crepe.

Within the same pitha family, dudh puli is made by wrapping filling in rice flour dough and cooking it in sweet milk. Patishapta is made by cooking a pourable batter thinly and rolling the filling inside, so every bite layers wrapper and filling. It can be eaten warm or cooled, and in some cases condensed milk is poured over it.

In one example that a person from Bangladesh brought to a gathering, a wrapper made only of wheat flour was rolled around coconut and a creamy filling made with milk, sugar, and crushed rice. Compared with versions that use rice in the wrapper, this example uses rice in a different part.

A Winter Festival and Memories of a Mother’s Kitchen

A family reminiscence contributed to a Bengali-language newspaper describes soaking rice the day before the festival and, the next morning, an elder of the family watching the heat while cooking one patishapta after another. In this memory, the aroma of new rice and date palm jaggery is tied to the kitchen of the family home in winter.

The Bangladeshi cook Dina Begum also describes the sound of cold batter being poured onto a hot griddle and the aroma of spiced coconut as memories of her mother’s kitchen. In a recipe based on her mother’s cooking, coconut is cooked with cardamom and cinnamon, then combined with date palm molasses and wrapped in a thin wrapper.

Glossary