Sweet Excess: Crafting Mishti in Bengal

This book is an ethnographic work on excess. Based on a decade-long field work of a single food substance — sweets — it follows sweet-making in sweetshops, domestic spaces, fairs, festivals and its representation in recipe books to understand how caste, religion, science and law inform the life of a food item with an extremely short shelf life. It shows how food items of conspicuous consumption find a meaning in everyday lives of people through its socio-cultural meanings - ritual, pride of...