ABSTRACT
The ethnographic description offered focuses on the collaborative work of food in Bengal as an event, a thing-actant and patient that reveals multiple networks of mixing as becoming, strategic mixing of mixtures being one of them. Thus, declaring at the very outset that its aim is to introduce 'order' into indigenous Bengali cooking, her book emphasises the spotless, well-managed, and well-displayed kitchen as indexical of the good housewife, and presents 'completely Bengali menus', while also offering Anglo-French non-vegetarian ones. In this chapter, the author attempts to reassemble the person- and place-actants/patients that shape this ethnography. In the process of assembling and reassembling the normal foodscape, persons, food, and the city are constituted by, and constitutive of, each other: each making the other acquire a particular relational form. The extension of the street, part of the ‘outside’, into the inward-turning house has ramifications for the redefinition of the public–private continuum.
