From feminist food memory to culinary authorship: analyzing Sandeepa Mukherjee Datta’s culinary narratives

The kitchen has always been construed as a gendered space. However, diasporic women have been recently reframing the kitchen as a space for redefining their identities. This study contributes to the scholarship at the intersection of diaspora, gender, and food studies by investigating domestic culinary spaces as locations for cultural negotiations and feminist self-articulation. It examines Sandeepa Mukherjee Datta’s writings, encompassing her blog (2006–2023), cookbook entitled Bong Mom’s Cookbook (2013), and her novel, Those Delicious Letters (2020), along with the authors’ personal interactions with Datta to connect popular food writing with academic discourse. It explores three key areas, i.e. cultural continuity, improvisation, and authorship. Datta involves herself and her readers in mutable circuits of shared knowledge extending beyond matrilineal enculturation and intergenerational transmission toward building female community. She challenges the essentialist codification of authentic Bengali cuisine by inserting requisite modifications and engaging in culinary re-authoring. Her protagonist, Shubhalaxmi Sengupta, mirrors her own personal negotiations, effectively blurring the line between Datta’s lived experiences and literary imagination. Through feminist studies and food criticism, this paper elucidates how cooking enables Datta and Shubhalaxmi to pursue their feminine voice by foregrounding the kitchen as a dynamic space of narrative agency in the diasporic context.