Food tells stories that history books often don’t. Set within TRI’s winter season exhibition ADDA: The Third Space, Text, Tastes and Tales of Mishti brings together a room of diners for a seven-course mini meal by Handpicked by Amrita, where Bengali mishti becomes the lens through which Kolkata’s histories, hierarchies, and cultural memory are explored and savoured. 

Woven through each course is the ethnographic research of Dr. Ishita Dey, drawn from her publication Sweet Excess: Crafting Mishti in Bengal, a work that reads recipes as archival maps, tracing stories of migration, trade, and ecology embedded within the region’s most beloved sweets. The afternoon journeys through sweet shops, homes, fairs, and festivals across Bengal, asking what mishti reveals about who we are, where we come from, and what we choose to pass on.