Smoke, Rice, Water: Recipes and Stories from a Bengali Home

For Kishwar Chowdhury, Bengali food cannot be separated from the people, places, and histories that produced it. Smoke, Rice, Water brings 100 recipes from this vast and culinarily underrepresented region into her home kitchen in Melbourne, combining recipes with the stories and traditions that give them context. 

The book begins with a history of Bengal before presenting a cuisine shaped by season, geography, migration, and centuries of cultural exchange. Recipes range from street snacks and Mughal court dishes to fish curries, green mango dal, vegetable dishes, and the celebrated sweets of Bengal, with traditional techniques made accessible to the home cook. 

Chowdhury is a second-generation migrant who grew up in Australia in a Bengladeshi family, and the book is also concerned with what happens to food traditions when they travel. Her parents grew Bengali vegetables that were difficult to find locally, while the family table became a place for preserving connections to a country thousands of miles away. 

A cookbook and also a record of cultural inheritance, Smoke, Rice, Water presents Bengali cooking as a living cuisine instead of something fixed in the past. Chowdhury offers both the recipes and the context needed to understand a food culture shared by hundreds of millions of people.

Hardcover. Color photographs throughout.