Rise of ‘New Women’ and the Culinary Culture of the Late Nineteenth Century Bengal: A Historical Review

Bengal as a region has its own culinary culture. In the patriarchal society, old women had carried on the age-old prejudice and rules within the household, they ran the domestic kitchens. But, usually they had no connection with the outer world. From the 1880s onward domestic manuals had been written by the male members of the Bengali families. These manuals sought to train the wife in the difficult task of running a household efficiently, maintain harmony within the family, be the ideal companion to the educated husband, pay meticulous attention to the health of the family and provided recommendations for other matters, even some manuals devoted entirely to food and cooking and attempted to teach culinary skills to women. In this paper, the author would like to focus on how the Bengali educated middle-class men in search of “new women” (educated modern women) formed a new section of progressive women and these women had shown interest in various fields. This section of women were not passive for a long time, they tried to bring some changes in the cooking style too. They had started to cook scientifically; these educated women showed their concerns about health, nutritious food and cosmopolitan cuisine; to share their new recipes; they had started to write columns in the Journals and published new cookbooks. In this paper, the author would like to show those matters in detail.