At last year’s Serendipity Arts Festival, Edible Issues hosted a unique session led by cultural anthropologist and food researcher Ishita Dey. Titled The Sensorium of Sweet-Making in Bengal, the workshop invited participants to immerse themselves in the tactile, sensory, and social world of Bengal’s traditional sweet-making practices.

The session explored the overlooked world of tools and objects central to the region’s sweet industry — an unorganised yet culturally rich sector powered by daily acts of craftsmanship. Through storytelling and demonstration, Ishita unpacked the relationship between tools, labour, and memory in Bengal’s sweet shops (mishtir dokan).

Key highlights included:

• The chhana transport containers — vessels that ferry freshly curdled milk solids, a vital ingredient in Bengali sweets, tracing their journey through small dairies to sweet shops.

• The wooden pata — flat boards used for shaping and imprinting intricate designs onto sweets like sandesh and mishti doi, a practice where hand movements and textures become a form of language.

• Traditional wooden molds — intricately carved tools that give sweets their signature forms, embedding motifs, seasonal markers, and symbolic meanings into everyday desserts.

The workshop invited participants to reflect on how these tools carry stories of migration, caste, gender, and economy within Bengal’s culinary heritage. It was a celebration of the sensorium — the collective sensory experience — of sweet-making as a cultural archive.

About Ishita Dey:
Ishita is a Delhi-based anthropologist and food scholar whose work centres on food, labour, and memory in urban spaces. She has extensively researched Bengal’s sweet economy, particularly the lives and practices of migrant workers and the unregulated chhana trade that fuels the industry.