Homemade Pitha: Bangladesh's Winter Sweet Tradition

In Bangladesh, winter has a smell: rice flour steaming over a clay pot, coconut being grated and date palm jaggery melting in a pan. It is pitha season, and for many British Bangladeshis it is the part of desh we miss most when November comes round.

Why pitha belongs to winter

Pitha follows the harvest. After the aman rice is cut in late autumn, families celebrate the new rice at Nobanno, and the fresh grain is ground into flour. At the same time, date palm trees are tapped in the cold early mornings for their sap, which is boiled down into khejur gur. New rice and fresh gur together are what make winter pitha taste the way it does.

The pitha to know

• Bhapa pitha: steamed rice-flour cakes filled with gur and coconut, sold hot from roadside stalls on winter evenings.
• Chitoi pitha: plain rice-flour cakes cooked in clay moulds, eaten with gur, mutton curry or bhorta.
• Patishapta: thin crêpes rolled around coconut and kheer.
• Puli and dudh puli: little dumplings shaped like crescents, simmered in thickened milk.
• Nakshi pitha: fried pitha carved with patterns before cooking, a real test of patience.

Bhapa pitha in a London kitchen

You don't need a special pot. You need a small bowl, a clean cotton or muslin cloth and a saucepan.

1. Rub 250g of rice flour with a pinch of salt and sprinkle in warm water a spoon at a time, until it clumps when pressed but still crumbles. Rest it for 15 minutes, then pass it through a sieve.
2. Loosely fill a small bowl halfway with flour, add a spoon of crumbled khejur gur and a spoon of grated coconut, then cover with more flour. Don't press it down.
3. Stretch the cloth over a saucepan of simmering water and tie or hold it tight. Turn the bowl out onto the cloth, cover with the bowl or a lid, and steam for 5 to 7 minutes.
4. Lift it off carefully and eat it hot.

The first few may crumble. That's part of the tradition too. Ask any nani.