This is a story about “rice and water” and the violations of geography by history. Galvanized by voluntary exile, it is an attempt to read the grain for the encounter between cultures buried in the depth of hearth and home, not simply between East and West but also within ourselves—the colonized and decolonized fragments of our minds and the complicit and resistant practices of cooking and eating. “Immigration often involves dislocation and social demotion,” writes Bharati Mukherjee, a Bengali-American author. “Immigrants carry the bruises, and often the scars, from missed signals and misread signs. They’ve traded their certain place...

My intention in this chapter is to provide the pre-immigration baseline for the discussion of Bengali-American foodways in the subsequent chapters. What matters for my purposes are the practices of middle-class Bengalis from Calcutta.¹ I address only the practices of the middle class, because that is the demographic characteristic of West Bengali migrants, and I present data for 1970–80, the period when most of my respondents left India. I consider earlier foodways only when they have a bearing on later generations.

I begin with the ecological factors that continue to shape Bengali food habits, such as the preferences for...

Breakfast for almost every Bengali-American interlocutor is milk and dry cereal or toast. Lunch consumed at or near the workplace is a slice of pizza, sometimes a sandwich . In contrast, dinner remains the realm of “tradition,” where there is still a literal truth to the question asked by a Bengali: “Have you had rice?” when she means “Have you eaten?”

Although changes in breakfast and lunch are moving in the same direction, these meals have different stories to tell. Breakfast is eaten at home, lunch at work; one meal is taken in the privacy of the home, the other...

“Whatever is not Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Indian, American, French, Italian cooking, IS ethnic” announces a Japanese informant (Ashkenazi and Jacob 2000: 46). He goes on to classify food into three categories: his “natural” Japanese food (nihonjin); familiar foods that are not his own (those listed earlier); and unfamiliar food (or “ethnic”). This is as good an illustration of what “ethnic” food means to people as any, although the details of the Japanese perspective are a little different from the American one.

A survey of ethnic restaurants conducted in 1999 by the U.S. National Restaurant Association identified twenty different cuisines that...

Our understanding of other people is dependent on our conceptions of their gendered roles in the making of the household. The heart of my research is about food consumption and its place in the construction of identity. Yet I cannot construct a compelling picture of food consumption without some observations on food work. I focus on a few questions. First, who does what food-related work in Bengali-American households? Second, how has migration affected the distribution of that work? Third, how does that compare with what “American” women do? Finally, what does the division oflabor tell us about distribution of power...

Salman Rushdie writes about the “chutneyfication” of the world . I in turn draw your attention to the world of chutneys. What happens when the chutney goes global? This is not about McDonald’s or Coca-Cola; neither is it about “ethnic” restaurants in metropolitan centers. It is about home-cooked ethnic meals in the metropolis. It is a particularly intriguing pattern to study because it focuses on everyday domestic cooking, which is relatively under-studied, and it reverses the usual trajectory of globalization. Most studies of the globalization of food address either the “McDonaldizati on” of the world or the great “multicultural” flowering...