Kolkata’s Forgotten Portuguese Cheese

01Slide 1 — The reveal: Kolkata’s New Market still sells Bandel cheese, a tiny white or smoked-brown cheese with a distinctly salty, crumbly texture.

02Slide 2 — The place connection: Bandel, roughly 50 kilometres from Kolkata, was a Portuguese settlement in Hooghly; the surviving Basilica of the Holy Rosary preserves that colonial landscape.

03Slide 3 — The method: makers curdle milk with lemon juice or another souring agent, drain the curds, shape them into small rounds and smoke some of them for a deeper flavour.

04Slide 4 — The historical link: food historians and recent scholarship associate Bandel cheese with Portuguese fresh-cheese traditions and the introduction or popularisation of acid-curdling techniques in Bengal.

05Slide 5 — The Bengali connection: newer scholarship places Bandel cheese within the wider history of Bengal’s chhana-based sweets, including the transformation of imported or adapted techniques into distinctly Bengali foodways such as sandesh.

06Slide 6 — The endangered ending: production has become highly concentrated among very few makers, turning an unusual Kolkata market ingredient into a living heritage story.