Not a duck???

It is a mainstay of Indian cuisine and a favourite dish of the English; it has been since the Days of the British Empire when those posted to the Sub-Continent adopted the local food and brought it back to introduce it to the mainstream population.

Victorian sensitivities, not being amused by a lot of things, led to the abandonment of the real name for the natural source of this foodstuff and so the Bummalo was confined to linguistic history, almost as much as the latin name of Harpodon nehereus.

In its natural existence the creature is a marine lizardfish, not at all pretty or photogenic and thrives in natural habitats in sub tropical seas from southern Asia to the Arabian Sea although is particularly abundant in The Ganges River . Fully grown the fish is a narrow, usually 6 to 8 inches long and slimy to the skin with a season amongst the indigenous fisherman population in November and December and on shore processing taking place from December until March.

This involves  filleting, with the ventral side cut open and the heads, tails and fins trimmed off. The skeleton is pulled out, the flesh flattened and cut into rectangular pieces. The pieces are immersed in 5% brine for a few minutes and dried outside in the sun for about 40 hours. They are then pressed individually in a roller press and further dried in the sun for about 10 hours. The drying is done on scaffolds made from bamboo poles fixed in the sand with bars tied with thick ropes horizontally in lines one above the other. The dried pieces are bundled and packed in polythene sheets.

Under normal cooking conditions the fresh bummalo fish is almost rendered to a pulp (bones and all). It can also be dipped in batter and deep-fried.

In modern times a higher volume of exporting of the processed product into European markets was subject to a mass of EC documentation, including a fumigation certificate, a phyto-sanitary certificate, a Chamber of Commerce certificate and an export agency certificate.

This burgeoning administrative process almost killed off the trade were it not for high demand from the public as consumers for what we know as Bombay Duck.

There is a mystery about how this dried fish came by its name. Yes, madness, it is not a duck but a fish. There are a number of conflicting urban myths about the origins of the name.

The most popular appears to be that during the British Raj, the Europeans could not stand the smell of the bummalo fish drying in the sun in the coastal regions where they inevitably holidayed to escape the sweltering inland climate. It reminded them of the odour of the wooden railroad cars of the Bombay Postal trains, which were well known for their tendency to go mouldy. musty and pungent during the humid monsoon season . The Hindi word for postal mail is "dak", hence the Bombay-Dak, or Bombay-Duck.

Another etymology also relates to railways. When the rail links started on the Indian subcontinent, people from eastern Bengal were made aware of the great availability of the locally prized bummalo fish on India's western coasts and began importing them by the railways. Since the smell of the dried fish was overpowering, its transportation was later consigned to the mainly off-peak running mail train; the Bombay Mail (or Bombay Daak) thus reeked of the fish smell and "You smell like the Bombay Daak" was a common term in use in the days of the British Raj. In Bombay, the local English speakers picked up the derogatory terms, before they eventually corrupted into "Bombay duck".

Nonetheless, the Oxford English Dictionary dates "Bombay duck" to at least 1850, two years before the first railroad in Bombay was constructed, making this explanation unlikely.

Yet another myth , according to local Bangladeshi stories  is that the term Bombay duck was first coined by Robert Clive, the historic Clive of India, after he tasted a piece during his conquest of Bengal. It is said that he associated the pungent smell with that of the newspapers and mail which would come into the cantonments from Bombay.

The term, Bombay Duck, was later popularised among the British public by its appearance in Indian restaurants in the UK.

I like, best of all the explanation that the priggish and self-righteous Victorians were just plain embarrassed to refer to bummalo fish because it sounded too rude.