COPPERWhat is the national dish of Bangladesh?
Bangladesh has no officially declared national dish. The answer most often given is rice and fish, and above all ilish (hilsa), a rich, oily river fish fried in mustard oil or cooked in a mustard sauce and eaten with plain rice. Ilish itself does have official status: it is the national fish of Bangladesh and a registered Geographical Indication since 2017.
Why rice and fish, not a single dish
Bangladeshi cooking has been shaped by a riverine, monsoon country. Rice is the staple food, and fish is the most common source of protein. A meal built on a mound of plain rice with a fish dish beside it is the everyday answer to "what do Bangladeshis eat?".
That is why lists of national dishes give "rice and fish" for Bangladesh rather than one recipe. When people name a single fish, it is ilish.
How a rice and fish meal works
Fish is a core part of Bengali eating, and in Bangladesh far less meat is eaten than fish. Cooks prefer freshwater and brackish-water fish to sea fish, and serve them either as a curry or as a fried steak. Besides ilish, the best-known fish curries are made with boal, rohu and pabda.
A traditional Bengali meal moves from lighter dishes to richer ones, with taste cleansers in between, and rice remains the main part of the meal until the chutney course near the end. Today the dishes are more often set on platters in the middle of the table and everyone serves themselves.
Mustard oil, the traditional cooking fat before soybean oil arrived, gives much of this food its sharp edge. On the coast around Chittagong, sea fish such as rupchanda (silver pomfret) and loita (Bombay duck) take over, often dried as shutki.
What is ilish?
Ilish (Tenualosa ilisha), called hilsa in English, is a fish of the herring family. It lives in the sea and swims up rivers to spawn, which is when it is caught in the Meghna and Jamuna and the delta that flows into the Bay of Bengal. It is oily and tender, and silver shot with gold and purple when alive.
Its status is official on several counts:
- National fish of Bangladesh.
- Geographical Indication of Bangladesh, declared on 6 August 2017 by the Department of Patents, Designs and Trademarks.
- Protected by a ban on catching juvenile fish (jatka) and by fishing bans during the breeding season.
- Bangladesh is the world's largest producer, ahead of Myanmar and India.
How ilish is cooked
Bengali cooks say ilish can be cooked in more than 50 ways: fried, steamed, smoked, baked in young plantain leaves or simmered in a mustard seed paste, the dish known as shorshe ilish. Because the fish is so fatty, it needs very little oil.
The simplest version is ilish bhaja. Steaks about 2 cm thick are rubbed with nothing but turmeric and salt, left 20 minutes, then fried 3 to 4 minutes a side in mustard oil heated until it smokes. The oil left in the pan, ilisher tel, is spooned over hot rice with fried green chillies. Our ilish bhaja recipe gives the full method.
Ilish matters beyond the plate. In many Bengali Hindu families a pair of fish, jora ilish, is bought for puja days, and the fish is given as a gift at weddings.
Is ilish a Bangladeshi or Indian dish?
Both. Ilish is eaten all over Bengal, and it is the state fish of West Bengal in India, as well as popular in Odisha, Assam and Andhra Pradesh. Mustard-based fish curries are a shared Bengali tradition on both sides of the border. India's own answer to the national dish question is quite different; see the national dish of India.
What sets Bangladesh apart is supply: most of the world's ilish catch comes from Bangladeshi waters, and the government regularly restricts exports, lifting them in part for Durga Puja shipments to India.
Other dishes to know from Bangladesh
Kacchi biryani comes from the Mughlai cooking that the Nawabs of Dhaka brought to Bengal. Kacchi means raw: mutton marinated in yogurt and mustard oil goes into the pot uncooked, under parboiled rice, and cooks for 70 to 90 minutes in the steam trapped by a lid sealed with dough.
Khichuri, rice cooked with lentils, is eaten at iftar during Ramadan and given to the sick. The bhuna khichuri version dry-roasts the moong dal and fries the grains in ghee first, so it finishes like a pilaf rather than a porridge.
All three recipes are on our page about the food of Bangladesh, and the neighbouring kitchens are covered in our guide to South Asian food.
The recipes
- Ilish bhaja🇧🇩 Bangladesh · 40 minutes
Kacchi biryani🇧🇩 Bangladesh · 9 hours
Bhuna khichuri🇧🇩 Bangladesh · 1 hour and 10 minutes
Questions people ask
Does Bangladesh have an official national dish?
No. No dish has been declared national by law. Rice and fish, particularly ilish, is the answer most often given, and ilish is officially the national fish.
What is the national fish of Bangladesh?
Ilish (hilsa, Tenualosa ilisha). It was also declared a Geographical Indication of Bangladesh on 6 August 2017.
What is shorshe ilish?
Shorshe ilish is hilsa cooked in a sauce of mustard seed paste and mustard oil, one of the best-known Bengali fish dishes.
What is ilish served with?
Plain steamed rice. With fried ilish, the frying oil (ilisher tel) and fried green chillies are spooned over the rice.
Is ilish the same as hilsa?
Yes. Ilish (ইলিশ) is the Bengali name; hilsa, hilsa shad and hilsa herring are English names for the same fish, Tenualosa ilisha.
Keep reading
- Traditional food of Bangladesh: 13 dishes to know
- What is the national dish of Bhutan?
- What is the national dish of India?
- What is the national dish of the Maldives?
- What is the national dish of Nepal?
- What is the national dish of Pakistan?