Plating Yesterday Today

This Shantiniketan couple is tracing the subcontinent's displaced kitchens—one heirloom recipe at a time

- By TANISHA SAXENA

On a blistering July afternoon in Shantiniketan, guests gather beneath the terracotta eaves of a pale, eggshell-hued bungalow. A breeze stirs through the trees, carrying with it the scent of mango flower sherbet and slow-cooked rice. Inside the sunlit kitchen, shrimps are being gently steamed into dumpling-like pithe, coconut milk simmers quietly on the stove, and the stories flow as generously as the courses to come.

For Shuli Ghosh, co-founder and creative head of Sienna Calcutta, the experience was far more than just a meal. “As soon as we arrived, we were greeted by Amrita di’s warm smile and her airy cotton handloom sari,” she recalls. “It was the storytelling—between Amrita di and her elder son, Tiyash, as they prepared each dish in that sun-dappled kitchen—that opened me up to new ways of thinking about food, and life.”

Five years ago, Amit Sen and Amrita Bhattacharya left behind their 35th-floor duplex in Kolkata for a quiet farmhouse in Shantiniketan, trading skyline views for a patch of fertile earth. What began as a personal reinvention has since grown into a quiet radical culinary movement—one that pieces together Bengal’s migratory histories through recipes and oral traditions.