Unearth the Enigmatic Indian Cheesecake Secrets from a 1904 Book: A Culinary Adventure!

Indian cheese cake

This article talks about the Indian cheesecake recipe secrets are found way back in a 1904 book

“What can a cookbook written in Bengali in 1904, filled with dessert recipes, teach us about colonialism and food habits? Journalist Priyadarshini Chatterjee writes a lot about it.

One hot summer afternoon in the late 2000s, I came home to find an unusual sight in my aunt’s kitchen in Kolkata, a city in eastern India’s West Bengal state. “I’m making cheesecake,” she said as she crushed paneer (which is believed to be equivalent to Indian cottage cheese) in a mixer from decades ago. She must have seen the look of doubt on my face.

“Cottage cheese,” she said jokingly, emphasizing the cheese, and then told me how she had managed to get the recipe from a friend.

That night, my aunt made what was clearly a sweet and dense mousse-like dessert that was white in color and sat on top of layers of crushed Marie biscuits set with butter. We loved the dessert’s pleasant simplicity but had to eat it quickly before it melted into a watery mess. This was the Indian cheesecake made and was so yummy!.

Was it cheesecake? No one could say for sure because none of us had tasted it before. Yet.

In his 2013 book “Calcutta: Two Years in the City,” author Amit Chaudhuri writes, “Oddly enough, cheesecake wasn’t introduced to India’s middle class by colonialism but by globalization. The triangular impostor was the full version of the original but tasted exactly the same. Like mousse.”

Before taking the first spoonful, I too tasted a little bit of the cheesecake that was light as a feather and slightly sweet with an airy cream that contained a little bit of tanginess. It was dense and creamy with a slight tanginess that clung to my mouth just a little bit. And every time I ate cheesecake, I thought of post-liberalization international India (the country’s economy opened up to the world in 1991).

So imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon a recipe for cheesecake in a Bengali book published over 100 years ago. After all, it seems that colonialism brought cheesecake to India’s middle class, at least Bengalis.

indian cheesecake

In 1904, writer, publisher, and columnist Bipradas Mukhopadhyay published a book titled “Mistanna Pak” (which translates to “Sweetmeat Specialties”).

The book is written in Bengali but is essentially an international book for people traveling around the world. Traditional Bengali sweets such as Sandesh, Chandrapuli, Pantua are shoulder-to-shoulder with sweets from all over the Indian subcontinent such as Gevar from Rajasthan or Sindhri Lote and European sweets such as rose-flavored Portuguese cakes, ginger creams and orange custards.

It is a dessert paradise and an amorphous space where borders melt away. And finally there are two different ways to make cheesecake.

Mukhopadhyay’s “Mistanna Pak” is unique not only as one of the earliest books of its kind originating from the subcontinent that specializes only in sweets but also for its vibrant internationalism.

In Bengal with its unparalleled tradition of sweets there were historically two types of sweets – one made by women at home using easily available ingredients such as coconut, jaggery, rice, lentils and solidified milk and another made by professional sweet makers. The latter focused on cottage cheese.

Mukhopadhyay’s cookbook was aimed at new-age Bengali women and clearly hinted at their repertoire of homemade cooking including cakes ( Indian cheesecake ), puddings, rich creams and cheesecakes while defining food and culinary culture during colonial Bengal’s era of building identity for middle-class Bengalis (gentlemen).

And Bengali bhadralok (gentlemen) were at the center of this change tasked with creating new cuisine and food culture rooted in tradition while accepting new things.

In an 1874 article in Bengali women’s magazine “Bamabodhini Patrika,” bhadralok were tasked with making rice pudding”

According to history, not all cheesecakes are made with cheese, especially cream cheese. It wasn’t until the 1920s and 30s that cream cheese was incorporated into cheesecake. However, cheesecake has existed in various forms since at least 2 BC.

British food writer Alan Davidson writes in the Oxford Companion to Food, “It is clear from eighteenth-century English receipts that not all cheesecakes contained curds or cheese; many were made with a rich custard of cream and eggs flavoured with lemon or yuzu peel.”

Throughout the 18th century, cheesecake recipes were frequently featured not only in cookbooks written by European expatriates living in India but also in internationally published cookbooks. The Indian Cookery Book (1880) features a recipe for “splendid cheesecake” made by combining whey-free curd with butter, egg yolks, sugar and grated nutmeg and baking it in patty pans lined with quick oven or puff paste.

In American journalist Margaret Dods’ 1826 book “The Cook and Housewife’s Manual,” there is a recipe for cheesecake made by soaking sponge biscuits in lime juice and mixing fresh butter, sugar and eggs with cheese. Pour the cinnamon- and nutmeg-flavored batter into small molds lined with a light thin paste and bake. Garnish with candied lemon peel.

Mukhopadhyay’s recipe seems to adapt various elements of different recipes to suit the indigenous kitchen according to the trends of the time. Recipe writers and compilers like Prayasundari Devi and Mukhopadhyay innovated and improvised on non-indigenous food recipes to suit Indian, particularly Bengali pantries and culinary cultures.

Given that Mukhopadhyay praises more nutritious European cuisine at the end of his Indian cheesecake recipe and urges Bengalis to incorporate eggs and meat into their diets and devotes part of his book to the correct way to toast bread, it is clear that many of these foods were still novel for this book’s middle-class clientele.

And this novelty was probably something that left room for minor manipulations, certain inaccuracies of which could not be challenged.

However, it cannot be denied that the unmistakable cosmopolitanism of Mistanna Pak and Mukhopadhyay’s efforts towards globalizing Bengali taste buds long before globalization became a buzzword.

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