Your answer to everything curious about Bengali cuisine – Arpan Roy’s The Non-serious Guide to Bengali Food

HarperCollins India is thrilled to announce the publication of Arpan Roy’s The Non-serious Guide to Bengali Food – a book about food and culture which is essentially a fun read, and surprisingly, not with recipes, but with the author’s unique, and at times humorous, insights into Bengali food and culture, made more intriguing with accompanying illustrations on the very subject of Bengali cuisine and eating and cooking cultures. This book promises to make for a visually intriguing guide to and creative commentary on a food loving community and their many cherished and curious food related practices and rituals, built together and evolved over time.

To tell you more about this book – Did you know that there’s a fish for every occasion of Bengali life? And that eating it with roti or chapati is a strict no-no in a Bengali household? Or that the Kolkata biriyani (with that perfectly boiled egg and potato) dates all the way back to the early days of the British Raj? Have you ever wondered who really invented the mighty roshogolla?

Tongue-in-cheek, whimsical and full of surprises, The Non-serious Guide to Bengali Food  by the author and creator of the immensely popular Facebook page, The Bong Sense, is your answer to everything you didn’t know about Bengali cuisine.

With doodles and bite-sized trivia, this book dissects the food-loving people and their quirks when it comes to cooking and consumption. From the Sunday mutton ritual to the correct way of eating a fish (always peti first), The Non-serious Guide also delves into the historical and geographical background of popular Bengali cuisine.

About the author – Arpan Roy is a former atomic physicist based in Singapore who discovered his passion for writing humor during his PhD. Although away from India for the last two decades, he nurtures an almost academic curiosity about India society and culture. Creator of Bongsense and Columnist for CNN Arpan has also created Bongsense, a page to chronicle Bengali culture in bite-sized illustrations and doodles.

About HarperCollins Publishers India – HarperCollins Publishers India is a subsidiary of HarperCollins Publishers. HarperCollins India publishes some of the finest writers from the Indian Subcontinent and around the world, publishing approximately 200 new books every year, with a print and digital catalogue of more than 2,000 titles across 10 imprints. Its authors have won almost every major literary award including the Man Booker Prize, JCB Prize, DSC Prize, New India Foundation Award, Atta Galatta Prize, Shakti Bhatt Prize, Gourmand Cookbook Award, Publishing Next Award, Tata Literature Live Award, Gaja Capital Business Book Prize, BICW Award, Sushila Devi Award, Prabha Khaitan Woman’s Voice Award, Sahitya Akademi Award and the Crossword Book Award. HarperCollins India has been awarded the Publisher of the Year Award three times: at Publishing Next in 2015, and at Tata Literature Live! in 2016 and 2018.HarperCollins India also represents some of the finest publishers in the world including Egmont, Oneworld, Harvard University Press, Bonnier Zaffre, Usborne, Dover and Lonely Planet.

For further information and queries, please write to: Shabnam.Srivastava@harpercollins.co.in

 Order the book here – Amazon.in: https://www.amazon.in/dp/935489190X