Kishwar Chowdhury brings her book ‘Smoke Rice Water’ to Dhaka

When Kishwar Chowdhury cooked panta bhat, bhorta, korma and other Bengali dishes on MasterChef Australia, something became very clear to her. A lot of people watching from the West did not really know where to place the food of the Bangladeshi people.

“They could taste it, maybe admire it, or even be curious about it. However, the deeper meaning was missing. Before they could fully understand the food, they had to understand the people behind it,” said Kishwar on stage.

That thought stayed with her, she wrote later, and little by little, over time, it became Smoke Rice Water: Recipes and Stories from a Bengali Home.

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The book was launched in partnership with Ghee in Dhaka in a private event at The Westin Dhaka, two weeks before its official publication.

For Kishwar, this book was never just a recipe book. “Food is never just food. It holds memories and families from the places people leave behind and the pieces of home they try to cling to,” she explains.

Born and raised in Australia, Kishwar grew up with Bengali food as something deeply personal. In her family home, food was one of the strongest ways of staying connected to Bangladesh.

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Her parents even grew Bangladeshi vegetables themselves because many of them were hard to find there. That detail says a lot. Sometimes, identity is not preserved through big speeches. Sometimes, it’s preserved through a gourd growing quietly in someone’s backyard.

At the launch, Kishwar spoke about how Bengali food, particularly Bangladeshi food, still does not have enough representation on the world stage. There are nearly 300 million Bengali people in the world, and still, many people look at South Asian food through a very narrow lens.

Bengali food often has to explain itself from scratch.

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That is partly why Smoke Rice Water matters. It's not just a matter of saying, "Here's a recipe, go and do it". It says, "Here is where this dish comes from, here is what it means, here is why it has survived."

The book was also born of grief. It was only two months after her mother’s death that Kishwar started working on it. In a lot of ways, the process pulled her back into her own history. She called it a sort of homecoming, a way to keep an authentic Bengali voice alive for her children and the generations after them.

She was also very clear about one thing. Bangladesh’s story had to be told by Bangladeshis. That meant bringing in Bangladeshi and Bengali creatives to shape the look and feel of the book. The photography includes work by Ata Mohammad Adnan from Dhaka and Rana Pandey from Kolkata, while Armele Habib captured the food photography.

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DhakaYeah’s illustrations add a very local, familiar texture, and the design was done by Aki Chan.

There was talk of a Bengali translation, too. “The rights are still with the publisher, Hardie Grant, for the time being, but Kishwar said it could happen if there’s enough interest from readers.

Ultimately, Smoke Rice Water feels like a book about food, but also about memory, migration, and belonging. It asks readers to cook, of course, but to listen, too. To know that there is a whole people, a whole history, and a home that keeps returning to the table, behind smoke, rice and water.

Photo: Daniel D’Cruze