Calories in Bengali Fish Curry

The databank's recipe is richer than the everyday jhol many Bengali homes cook. It uses 100 g of pomfret, 100 g of onion, 5 g of tomato, 15 g of curd and 15 ml of mustard oil for a single bowl, which reads more like a thick onion-based gravy than a thin broth with potato and a pinch of nigella. A homestyle macher jhol with rohu or katla, made runny with less oil and no onion paste, would be lighter than the figure here; a kalia or a doi maach would be closer to it. So read 340 kcal as a bowl of the fuller style.

Fat supplies 58% of the energy, protein 26% and carbohydrate 16%. The 21.8 g of fat is mainly the 15 ml of mustard oil, with the pomfret adding some of its own. Protein, 22.5 g, comes from the 100 g of fish. The carbohydrate is higher than in most fish curries because of the 100 g of onion, which also brings most of the 6 g of fibre. Here the mustard oil is the lever: the fish and the onion are fixed, and the calories move with the oil.

A bowl is about 16% of a sedentary man's daily energy requirement and 20% of a woman's, before the rice it is always eaten with. It gives 22.5 g of protein, which is the strong point of a fish-and-rice meal. In a Bengali lunch the fish comes after dal, a fried item and a vegetable, so the oil across the whole meal counts for more than the oil in this one bowl. Two helpings come to 680 kcal and 45 g of protein. Keeping the rice modest and the bhaja small leaves room for the fish.

This recipe gets more than half its energy from fat, 21.8 g in the bowl, and that is with a measured 15 ml of oil. Home cooking that fries the fish first can go well past it. The fish itself is the valuable part. People who have been asked to limit fat or salt, for cholesterol or blood pressure, should follow the amounts their doctor or dietitian has given them.