Last month, when I heard Bunny Gupta had died, I felt a pang. I did not know her. But I knew her byline from newspapers in Kolkata. Most of all, I knew her as one of the authors of a book I loved — The Calcutta Cook Book: A Treasury of Recipes from Pavement to Palace.

I had gifted the book to my mother. I had inscribed it thus: “Dear Ma, Remembering all the shudhu shudhu kheye nili, ebar bhaat-ta ki diye khaabi?” My mother would say, “Oh, you ate that up just by itself, now what will you eat the rice with?”

The 1995 book, unlike modern cookbooks, did not come with glossy, droolworthy pictures of dishes. It went beyond the recipes. The authors talked to “elders in different groups of the city about their food philosophy and habits”.

The recipes were from old notebooks, memories of khansamas and oral history, and the book talked about the different currents that had turned Kolkata into “a cosmopolitan jigsaw”.

The names of those who had provided the recipes reflected that narrative — Sofia Bibi, Renukana Das Gupta, Caroline Fernandes, Sita Pasricha, Lt. Col. Hamilton, Sohinder........

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