At 66, She Is Travelling Village to Village to Find Ingredients Bengal Forgot

At 66, Pritha Sen does not call herself a great cook. She calls herself “a deconstructor of food”, tracing the who, what, why, when, where, and how behind every dish today.

At six, she watched her uncle make Goalondo fowl curry while her grandfather recalled the Padma River, its mudbanks and the game birds and waterfowl once found there in Bengal. Her search led to family memories and old travellers’ accounts.

What Happened

One railway man remembered the curry as a thin, red gravy with garlic, chillies and mounds of parboiled rice. As Pritha traced the curry’s past, she realised every dish carries a story of how it came to be.

• Through pop-ups, restaurants, consultancies and documentation, Pritha continues to bring forgotten ingredients and old cooking methods back to the table, keeping their stories alive for generations.

• Her Banglar ghorowa thala brings together vegetarian and fish dishes, showing how Bengal’s home cooking uses boiling, steaming, roasting and smoking with little oil while retaining nutrition.

• In Nagaland, she cooked rohu with wild Naga lime, mustard, raja mircha, mejenga leaves, and wild putuko, wrapping the fish in colocasia leaves before steaming it over a wood fire.

Key Details

She wanted to document food so people would ask why we eat the way we do. Her work took her into villages, where she sat with women in their kitchens, listening to their recipes and memories.

• She aimed to pass Bengali cuisine’s culinary heritage to younger generations.

• She began writing and sharing these food stories, then took them to demonstrative pop-ups.

• “The maximum nutrition lies in the peels and stalks,” she explains.

Why It Matters

Their conversations became another way for her to understand food.

• She remembered eating seasonal produce at home, including colocasia leaves and stalks, gourd leaves and stalks.

• Those conversations showed Pritha how indigenous knowledge helped communities draw maximum nutrition from limited resources, even through generations of changing food habits.

What Reports Say

Coverage of the story so far points to:

• Continued reporting by The Better India as more details emerge