The intersection of food and culture has long been recognized as a rich and complex terrain for scholarly inquiry, offering insight into how gastronomic habits and culinary preferences shape the individual’s sense of personal and collective self. Migration to other countries and staying at a place as the last one of a particular community, presents an interesting field to explore the intricate relationship between foodways. Right from the time of Structuralists like Claude Levi Strauss and Roland Barthes, food has been recognized to be a significant human behavioural code as language. For ethnic communities like the Jews who are held together by a problematic concept of homeland, food practices denote and connote a way of defining these cultures, occupying borders and negotiating with issues of power, memory, dislocation and belonging. This paper shall try to read the specificities of rituals and food habits in the Calcutta Jewish community. The Man with Many Hats by Jael Silliman and Calcutta Kosher by Shelly Silas portray the lives of the Calcutta Jews and the ways of their culture and food practices in this land. The paper aims to study the intermingling of culinary cultures and consumptions and how the same generates affective associations and appropriations pertaining to memory and markers of identity. In a broader perspective this paper is an attempt to examine the entanglement of food, memory and identity formation.
Ayesha Khatun (Sun,) studied this question.