Phoolkopir Barfi: The Tale of Pragyasundari Devi & Vegetable for Desserts

Some sweet + savoury this Diwali

With this feature story, we’re introducing a new segment that invites writers, artists, academics, and researchers to explore what fascinates them—starting with a sweet vegetable barfi. When Zoya Naaz Rehman first told me about this unique flavour combination created in the 1900s, I was curious to know more, especially since I’ve just started researching flavour pairings in India. It’s fascinating how we’ve made non-native vegetables our own—chilies, tomatoes, cauliflowers. But, what’s more fascinating is the role of imagination in creating bold, creative and delicious recipes.

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Zoya Naaz Rehman (she/her) is a student and food scholar whose worldview is informed by her feminist, Muslim, and Indian identities. For her thoughts on food, public health, and everything in between, follow her on Instagram @kohl.lined.perspectives.

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Had Pragyasundari Devi lived today, she may very well have been in the running for a James Beard award. Or running the Foundation itself. 

Growing up in Jorasanko Thakurbari,^¹ the ancestral home of the Tagore family and a Mecca of the arts in colonial-era Bengal, Pragyasundari Devi was far more than the 20th century’s vocabulary had the capacity to describe. Perhaps, today, one might recognise her as a food scholar. Others might call her a pioneer. Avant-garde, even. But of what use are these labels, hypothetical that they are? Only to convey that, when it came to food, Devi was futuristic and fearless. 

And I don’t say that lightly. Devi spent decades of her life writing, archiving, and inventing in kalavidya, as her father, Hemendranath, described the culinary arts. Going against the tide of the time, Devi published a journal Punyo (1897), with topics centering the experiences and interests of its primarily women readers; the periodical encouraged critical conversation, reminiscent of academic dialogue. As an archivist, she recorded Bengali recipes she learned from rural Bengali women. With these recipes, Devi also did the important work of documenting a vocabulary –maybe even a dialect– used exclusively by women within the home when speaking about food.²

Amish o Niramish Ahaar

Devi’s cookbook, Amish o Niramish Ahaar, was first published in the early 1900s, and is widely acknowledged as a groundbreaking book published by a woman in Bengal at the time. Cultural historian Utsa Ray, suggests that women like Devi used cookbook writing as a means of creating new identities for themselves beyond the domestic sphere. According to Ray, recipe writing was an act that pushed past the boundaries of the “private/domestic” domain and existed within the “public/professional” one.³ In a revised edition of Amish o Niramish Ahaar with over 1,500 recipes, Ira Ghosh, Devi’s granddaughter, writes in the foreword about her grandmother’s contribution to the invention of the ahead-of-its-time Icmic Steam Cooker with Indubhushan Mallick. Devi is also credited to having introduced the menu, called kromini, to Bengal, which she did at the dinner hosted at Thakurbari by the Tagores in honor of her uncle and Nobel Laureate Rabindranath’s 50th birthday.⁴   

Icmic Steam Cooker. Source: The Better India

But the kromini isn’t the only reason Devi made this banquet on the 7^th night of May in 1911 memorable. Devi would also use this dinner as the moment to debut a dish that would shock and awe her audience and their unsuspecting palettes. This was not new –her experiments in the Thakurbari kitchen were well-known and often documented in Punyo– and as the final course would approach, Devi would send out plate after plate that sang of her skills. The barfi would be devoured even as it would champion an unlikely ingredient, and Devi would only give into her admirers’ pleas to let them in on the secret at the end of the course. Cauliflower, she would confess, was the hero of her creation.⁵

The dessert revealed at Rabindranath’s birthday dinner went on to be known by a number of names, including phoolkopir barfi⁶ and kavi sambardharana barfi.² Now demystified, Devi had since revealed that it was boiled cauliflower and khoya, with sugar to sweeten it. As most barfis go, it was elaborately sumptuous, with saffron, nuts, and raisins, and adorned with a delicate layer of silver and gold leaf.

The eccentricity of Devi’s barfi did not stem from her preparation of it. In fact, anyone familiar with mithai might even consider her method orthodox, bizarre as that may sound here. Instead, its newness is entirely in its central ingredient. A vegetable! While vegetables in desserts weren’t unheard of, they certainly weren’t (and largely, still aren’t) the norm. The holy trinity of well-loved vegetable-centric desserts is made up of the pies –pumpkin and sweet potato– dating back to the 17th and 18th centuries,⁷ carrot cake, and in parts of Asia as early as the 10th century, some sort of carrot pudding which in India came to be known as gajar ka halwa. But it’s hard to miss a commonality here – they’re all orange, and the use of such orange vegetables in creamy desserts was popular, especially in Medieval Europe. Moreover, all of these vegetables are starchy, with hints of sweetness simply begging to be unlocked and allowed to blossom. Probably for precisely this reason, carrots were used in desserts when sweeteners were prohibitively expensive in the Middle Ages in Europe.⁸ Cauliflower –cruciferous, white, and with its abysmal score on the Brix scale of sweetness⁹(Kleinhenz & Bumgarner, Functional Fertilizer) – has none of that natural sweetness, making it an unconventional choice, even among vegetables, for use in the final course of a meal. In fact, at the time, it might even have been controversial. 

Cauliflower + Mishri. @rinisinghi

In the 1820s, a Dr Jemson, the botanist responsible for managing the Company Gardens located in present-day Uttar Pradesh, imported cauliflower seeds into India. Unlike its native counterparts, the cauliflower was a colonially-introduced comestible. When faced with its promotion, Indians were hesitant to adopt it, thanks to its British association and subsequent foreignness. Gradually, around the early 1900s, it moved from being featured almost exclusively in cookbooks written by Europeans, to being found in Indian cookbooks too. Still, among the Bengali public, it wouldn’t be part of religious ritualistic offerings and faced pushback in the form of caste taboos.¹⁰

So how did Devi arrive at the design of this recipe? Along with her own extensive journey in food, it could also be said that Devi had an added advantage in the form of her culinary lineage – the Tagore family, after all, was no stranger to gastronomic adventure. Devi’s great-grandfather, Dwarkanath, was famed for his Gatsby-esque feasts, and sampled the world’s finest food in the course of his international travels. The Tagore patriarch was meticulous, recording his impressions in a journal (later published in his memoir), sometimes comparing new flavors with older ones.¹¹ Devi’s uncle, Rabindranath, hosted a literary club, Kamkheyali Sabha, where he insisted on serving experimental foods. At Jorasanko, his idiosyncratic tastes, catered to by his wife, Mrinalini Devi, led to the birth of what is now known as Tagore cuisine, in which bhaat, dal, and maachherjhol sit alongside Philipini Murgi, Irish Stew, and salmon in hollandaise sauce, and jackfruit yogurt fish curry has no fish in it.¹²Devi’s cousin, Abanindranath, reportedly founded a culinary school, where equally quirky dishes were made by making tweaking traditional recipes.¹³Even cauliflower, with its slow acceptance in Bengali society, had seamlessly been incorporated into the Tagores’ food, and found a place at their table in a variety of ways, sometimes cooked with eggs, other times as cauliflower dampokto (dumpukht).

But despite its presence at Thakurbari, it almost seems like the odds are stacked against cauliflower when it comes to Devi’s phoolkopir barfi. Maybe her food gene gave her a little push and sparked her creativity, but eventually, only her ingenuity can take credit for this. Just about a century later, the world has caught up with her bold ideas. Cauliflower is a vegetable that has honed the skill that is shape-shifting, morphing into rice, pizza bases, burger patties, and anything else you want it to be, and vegetable-centric desserts have found their way into recipe design, becoming not only socially-acceptable but also haute cuisine. At New York City restaurants Gramercy Tavern and Blue Hill, chefs Miro Uskokovic and Dan Barber have featured everything from celery to sorrel on their respective dessert menus,¹⁴ and in 2023, Chef Pía Salazar’s vegetable-only desserts at her Quito restaurant Neuma won her the World’s Best Party Chef Award.¹⁵

Devi’s father was right to refer to food as kalavidya – kala meaning art, and vidya as in knowledge. Food lies at the meeting point of art and knowledge, and neither art nor knowledge are any good without the unexpected. Imagine if we’d never discovered that mixing blue and red makes purple. How, then, would Monet have described fresh air?¹⁶ What would the world be if no one ever ate the strange, capped fungus they found out in fields and forests? The absolute gift that mushrooms are would’ve entirely evaded us throughout our existence for the fear of trying something new. So why shouldn’t Devi have used a vegetable like cauliflower in her desserts? Why should she have lived – and eaten– within the lines? And more importantly, why should we? 

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1. Roy, Sumana. (2012) On Eating: Rabindranath Tagore's Dis(h)courses. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 35:1, 33-47, DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2011.648901. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00856401.2011.648901.

2. Bhattacharya, Paushali. From the Kitchen of Rabindranath Tagore: Tracing the Bengal Renaissance in the Evolution of Culinary Arts, 2019, https://onlinejournals-heb.pen-nic.in/cass/admin/freePDF/kds23n1r7ytv60hr28c4.pdf.

3. Ray, Utsa. Eating ‘Modernity’: Changing dietary practices in colonial Bengal. Modern Asian Studies. 2012;46(3):703-729. doi:10.1017/S0026749X11000515. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-asian-studies/article/abs/eating-modernity-changing-dietary-practices-in-colonial-bengal/624438D2EB0FC05F34A77E1FEF0D0E0E.

4. Biswas, Nilosree. Country Captain, Mutton Birinchi, & Hish-er Ulhas. National Herald India, 2021,  https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/food/country-captain-mutton-birinchi-and-ilish-er-ulhas.

5. Get Bengal. Pragyasundari Devi turned Jorasanko Thakurbari kitchen to a centre of liberal feminism (2020) https://www.getbengal.com/details/pragyasundari-devi-turned-jorasanko-thakurbari-kitchen-to-a-centre-of-liberal-feminism.

6. Ved, Sonal. Was Tagore The OG Food Influencer? We Find Out. Grazia, 2021, https://www.grazia.co.in/lifestyle/food/was-tagore-the-og-food-influencer-we-find-out-8478.html

7. https://www.foodtimeline.org/foodpies.html 

8. https://www.foodtimeline.org/foodcakes.html#carrotcake

9. Kleinhenz, Matthew D. & Bumgarner, Natalie R. Using °Brix as an Indicator of Vegetable Quality: Linking Measured Values to Crop Management. Ohio State University Extension.  https://ohioline.osu.edu/factsheet/HYG-1651

10. Chatterjee, Priyadarshini. From gobi aloo to gobi manchurian: Celebrating 200 years of the cauliflower in India. Scroll, 2022, https://scroll.in/magazine/1020804/from-gobi-aloo-to-gobi-manchurian-celebrating-200-years-of-the-cauliflower-in-india

11. Chatterjee, Priyadarshini. Bengali food is deeply influenced by Tagore, but not the one you think. Scroll, 2022, https://scroll.in/magazine/1032493/bengali-food-is-deeply-influenced-by-tagore-but-not-the-one-you-think

12. Chunder, Rajashi. Dishes and Discourses: Culinary Culture at Jorasanko. Sahapedia, https://www.sahapedia.org/dishes-and-discourses-culinary-culture-jorasanko.

13. Lahiri, Indrajit. Takes from Tagore’s Kitchen. Moha Mushkil, 2020, https://moha-mushkil.com/food-tagores-kitchen-thakurbari-khaoadaoa/.

14. Burfielf, Tom. For some upscale chefs, vegetables are dessert.  The Packer, 2019, https://www.thepacker.com/news/foodservice-markets/marketing/some-upscale-chefs-vegetables-are-dessert:

15. Paredes, Ingrid. Eating vegetables for dessert: exploring the bold cuisine of Pía Salazar. The World’s Best 50, 2023, https://www.theworlds50best.com/stories/News/pia-salazar-nuema-ecuador-worlds-best-pastry-chef.html.

16. Babbs, Verity. Art Bites: Why the Impressionists Went Gaga for Purple. ArtNet, 2024, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/impressionist-purple-art-bites-2440920.