Working class rice just got nice, now that it's hit the supper club circuit

London: I recently helped curate a pantha bhaat - cooked rice soaked and fermented in water - platter here in London, replete with fried ilish (hilsa), daler bora (lentil fritters), and all. This was for a room full of Sunday pot roast loyalists paying good money for a dish that, a generation ago, wasn't considered good enough for the domestic help's lunch break.

Pantha bhaat is riding the wave of Instagram buzz around this once-humble, now hashtag-worthy dish back home in India. Turns out the internet has finally caught up to what grandmothers knew all along.

Pantha bhaat is historically one of the most looked-down-upon Bengali dishes. Relegated firmly to the background, it was a labourer's dish, never a lady's lunch, certainly not what the 'bhadralok' would be seen eating. Yet, for generations, the working man had this as his breakfast: rice soaked overnight, eaten cold, dressed with nothing more than a green chilli, a sliver of onion, and if the week had been generous, a fried fish on the side.


Cross into Odisha and the same idea shows up as pakhala, old enough for a day to be named after it - Pakhala Dibasa, celebrated every March 20. Assam has its poita bhat, eaten with potato mash and mustard oil. In Bihar and Jharkhand, soaked rice turns up as basi or gheel bhat. Chhattisgarh calls it bore basi.

Tamil Nadu has its pazhaya sadam, mashed and loosened with curd. Kerala calls it pazham kanji, best eaten with pickle and fried coconut. Andhra Pradesh and Telangana serve up chaddannam. Different regions, changed nomenclature. But the same basic genius - nobody wanted to waste, so water was added to leftover rice, and the rising temperature did its own chemistry.

What I find rather delicious about this whole reversal of fortune is that the dish didn't need reinventing to become fashionable. It just needed us to stop being snobs about it. Great-grandmothers did not need a lab coat to explain: leave rice in water overnight, and it quietly starts working on itself. No fancy equipment, no starter culture flown in from a specialty shop. Just time, water, and humid patience doing what it does best.

By morning, the rice has changed. It is tangier, softer, and, as it turns out, rather good for you. This isn't a wellness trend dressed up in ancient robes for Instagram clout. This is just fermentation, the same quiet magic behind yogurt, kimchi, and every sourdough loaf currently hogging your wallet. Except pantha bhaat got there first.

What the soaking actually does is rather clever. It nudges rice to release the iron, calcium, and other minerals that would otherwise stay locked away, stubbornly out of reach of your body no matter how much rice you eat. The labourer eating his morning plate was, quite unknowingly, getting more nourishment out of his bowl than his employer ever got from a plate of freshly steamed, 'proper' rice.

The cloudy leftover liquid most refined households would have tipped down the drain without a second thought. That does unglamorous work of its own, the kind that keeps the gut happy, and immune system alert.

The body handles this rice rather well compared to a freshly cooked plate. It doesn't come at you all at once. Which means that the working man's breakfast was quietly managing his energy through a long day of labour better than anything London's wellness cafes are currently charging well over 10 quid for.

Which brings me back to pantha bhaat served up in London. Watching people who'd normally reach for avocado toast queue up for a dish once considered too plain for polite company has its own kind of vindication. The 'bhadralok' took a hundred years to come around to the working-class dish, but got there in the end. Sometimes the food that was never meant to impress anyone is exactly the food that ends up doing it best. Probiotics at no extra cost.