By Agnibha Maity
In Bengal, culinary practices have been influenced at different times in history by different communities, and modern-day Bengali cookbooks celebrate the amalgamation of the various cooking techniques Bengali cooks picked up during these cross-continental interactions. However, the rise of the Bengali middle class and modernisation project – including kitchens – in the nineteenth century made way for women writers to archive and standardise recipes. It was at this time when Calcutta, now Kolkata, became the epicentre of food experiments and restaurant culture in India. Restaurants and taverns were run mainly by chefs trained to satisfy European taste buds. They revolutionised the traditional methods and changed the character of dishes with the ingredients borrowed from the West. For example, potatoes – found in every other Bengali dish, even in the famous Calcutta-style Biriyani – appeared on the Bengali platter only by the nineteenth century. The story for cauliflower – many winter cuisines are incomplete without it – is almost similar; colonisers introduced the cultivation of many such vegetables in Bengal. Before the advent of the Britishers, Medieval Bengal depended on rice, curd, fish, local leafy greens, preparations of pulses, and a handful of vegetables such as banana flowers and eggplants. Although Bengalis did not let go of any of the medieval dishes, a lunch or dinner menu from a contemporary household will show more familiarity with the preparation styles invented or modified in colonial times. It was Bengali middle-class women who were responsible for the standardisation of modern cooking practices with their meticulous everyday experimentations, and this evolution of recipes can be traced in many cookbooks written by women authors since the publication of Pragyasundari Devi’s Amish O Niramish Ahar in 1902.

Leela Majumdar’s cookbook, Rannar Boi (1979), co-authored by her daughter Kamala Chattopadhyay, follows the long tradition of archiving recipes but with exceptional care for women’s labour and nutrition in general. She was a gifted author of her time and belonged to one of the most renowned families of Kolkata. However, this cookbook does not belong to her oeuvre as a literary figure in Bengal but serves as a practical handbook for homemakers. She intended this to be a handy companion for everyday cooking. Traditional cooking methods used to be laborious because most of the dishes needed manual grinding of masalas and multi-step heating, and the hot climate forced women to prepare meals twice a day. A typical dish, such as kochu shaker ghonto (taro leaf mishmash), as found in Amish O Niramish Ahar and even in the recent The Calcutta Cookbook, requires the mixing of various spices, grating coconuts, adding pastes of cumin, chilli, and ginger. Cutting the stalks is also a professional task – the outer layer must be removed and washed with salt, or else calcium oxalate crystals might irritate throats. What is interesting about Leela Majumdar’s cookbook is that she avoids any nostalgic remembrance of tedious cooking rituals which exploited women’s labour. In the preface, she declares, “Don’t forget the dishes, but the recipes must be slightly altered… We intend that cooking no meal should take more than two hours.” She focuses on cleanliness, adopting modern kitchenware, and improving hygiene. She contrasts starkly with Europeans or Americans who prefer preparing one main dish per meal to save time for other work, such as a chicken roast accompanied by baked potato or salads. Her recipe notebook is plain and straightforward; there are no East-West divisions. It begins with varieties of soups, which Bengali elite society first tasted during the bloom of restaurant culture in the mid-nineteenth century.  From Scotch broth, tomato soup, and minestrone, she jumps to Bengali Khichdi, sour and bitter lentils, with ease. Her cookbook blurs the distinction other contemporary books celebrate, and her addition of practical notes entitled “The intricacies of homemaking,” along with simplified recipes in lucid Bengali, make the book friendly for readers of all backgrounds and education levels. 

Agnibha Maity is a PhD candidate and a UGC Senior Research Fellow at the Department of English, University of North Bengal. He obtained his M.A. and B.A. from the University of Calcutta. His PhD topic focuses on gendered identity in archival discourses. His research interests include subaltern studies, archival studies, and South Asian gender history. He loves discovering lost recipes from rural Bengal and archiving them when possible.