Celebrate with a Calcutta Street Christmas

I'm a Bengali girl who grew up in Calcutta (renamed Kolkata in 2001) and for me, Christmas is the most special festival. Many of the schools in the city – including the one I attended – are run by Christian missionaries, so Christmas was the festival that we got the most holidays for and as a child, it was very exciting to be on holiday for more than a month.

It felt like the whole school year was spent looking forward to our end-of-year Christmas party – it was a huge event and the only day we could wear our own clothes instead of the uniform. We'd have a church service, a meal and a dance and all the teachers were especially nice to us – the nuns let me get away with wearing a short skirt and high heels on that day. Usually, boys and girls were separated, but after the Christmas meal we'd all meet for a dance in the big hall, so lots of romances would begin there. Gossip about who wore what and who kissed who would be talked about for months after the event.

Christmas in Calcutta isn't celebrated at home; it's a chance to go out and party. For people of all ages, Christmas Eve is spent socialising and dancing the night away at one of the many colonial clubs in the city. As a teenager, it's the only night of the year your parents let you stay out late (until 1am, instead of 9pm). The whole city is lit with Christmas lights, especially Park Street (our equivalent of London's Oxford Street), which hosts a big switching-on event. Calcutta is very hot during the summer, with temperatures usually around 40C, but at Christmastime it cools to around 12C, so it's the perfect temperature to put on a nice party dress – shopping for Christmas-party outfits each year is a big part of the fun and build-up of excitement.

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Christmas food in Calcutta is not about turkey; we have our own version of a Christmas meal. Anglicised families eat roast chicken served with mashed potatoes, while the more traditionally inclined opt for the Calcutta version, Chicken Chaap – a baby chicken cooked in a creamy poppy-seed and cashew-nut sauce, served with paratha bread or rice. This is what I am serving on the Calcutta Street Christmas menu, as of course in London, there are plenty of places serving the classic British turkey with cranberry sauce, which, by the way, I absolutely love.

In Calcuttan cuisine, there's a lot of English influence left over from mid-18th century colonial times and a huge Anglo-Indian community that still exists there. As a child, every day for me started with an English breakfast – eggs, sausage, toast and baked beans - and this is the usual breakfast for a lot of families. The English also introduced bakeries to the city. One of the most famous – in the whole of India, in fact – is Flurys, where there's a queue outside every day. They serve a traditional English menu of savoury food and cakes such as Victoria sponge, plum cake and fruit cake. Generations of families buy Flurys Christmas cake every year as a tradition, so when I was putting together the Calcutta Street Christmas menu, it was inevitable I would pay homage to my favourite childhood bakery and name our festive dessert after them.

SHRIMOYEE CHAKRABORTY grew up in Kolkata, where her mother taught her to cook from a young age. In 2007, she moved to Mumbai to study economics and work as a TV presenter and after graduating, she relocated to the UK to study for her master's. Shrim's love for cooking traditional Bengali cuisine soon attracted friends to mini supper clubs at her home, leading her to launch Calcutta Street pop-up restaurants around London. In August 2016, Calcutta Street opened the doors to its first permanent location in London's prestigious Fitzrovia.

Visit Calcutta Street to experience Bengali home cooking and seasonal specialities. Christmas-party bookings are being taken now; Calcutta Street, 29 Tottenham St, London W1T 4RU; calcuttastreet.com