‘A compelling book with a remarkable mix of history, personal insights, and a genuine investment in making connections across continents, generations, and historical traditions. My absolute favourite is the section on the kaffir lime or gondhoraj lebu—so delightfully counterintuitive!’
—Jayanta Sengupta, director, Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata, India

‘In this delightful book, Nina Mukerjee Furstenau plays sharp-eyed detective and amiable guide as she traces essential Bengali ingredients along histories that are as surprising and creative as the cooks they inspire. Each ingredient in Chillies, Chhana & Rasa leads to a deeper understanding of how foods, gathered from all over the world, are claimed and made at home—a global story that Furstenau makes personal in luscious prose. I’ll never look at a green chilli—or any of these delicious dishes—the same way again.’
—Kate Lebo, author, The Book of Difficult Fruit: Arguments for the Tart, Tender, and Unruly

‘I was mesmerized by this ambitious book—a blend of memoir, research, and food lore—from start to finish. From inside her farmhouse kitchen in Missouri to the home of a traditional cheesemaker outside Kolkata, from the fish pond in her grandmother’s garden to the tea gardens of Makaibari, I walked with the author as she took me to multiple, flavor-rich worlds.’
—Sayantani Dasgupta, author, Women Who Misbehave

Nina Mukerjee Furstenau is a journalist and author with a special interest in food and identity. She won the 2014 M. F. K. Fisher Book Award for her food memoir, Biting Through the Skin: An Indian Kitchen in America’s Heartland, as well as the Les Dames d’Escoffier International Grand Prize for culinary literature. She has also written Tasty! Mozambique, Savor Missouri: River Hills Country Food & Wine, and been published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Feast, Sauce, Ploughshares, Painted Bride Quarterly, and the anthology Pie & Whiskey. She retired from the University of Missouri Science and Agricultural Journalism programme where she was the director of food systems communication. She is currently the editor of the FoodStory book series for the University of Iowa Press.