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The Indian cheesecake secrets found in a 1904 book Bipradas Mukhopadhyay’s 1904 cookbook was aimed at the new-age Bengali woman Source : bbc What can a 1904 cookbook – written in the Bengali language and filled with dessert recipes – tell us about colonialism and food habits? A lot, writes journalist Priyadarshini Chatterjee. On a scorching summer afternoon sometime in the late 2000s, I returned home to the unusual sight of my aunt skittering about in the kitchen of our house in the eastern city of Kolkata in India’s West Bengal state. “I am making cheesecake,” she announced, as she crumbled some paneer (considered an Indian equivalent of cottage cheese) into the decades-old mixer. She must have seen the flicker of doubt on my face. “Cottage cheese,” she quipped, stressing on the cheese, before she told me how she had coaxed the recipe out of a friend. What my aunt turned ...