An Indian Dessert, Beloved And Battled Over, Now Stars In Its Own Movie
In Kolkata, India, a city famous for its sweet tooth, the rosogolla — also known as rasgulla — is the most basic of sweets.
Ros means syrup. Golla means ball. It's a simple white spongy ball, made of chhena, an Indian version of cottage cheese, dunked in syrup. Classy enough to be served at weddings, innocuous enough to be served to invalids, you can never go wrong with a rosogolla. Like a white shirt, it's a classic. There are showier Indian sweets, filled with pistachios and saffron, covered with silver foil and rose petals. But the humble rosogolla is the only one with its own biopic.
On Dec. 21, the Bengali film will hit movie theatres in India. The trailer has all the ingredients of a crowd-pleaser: the winsome village belle, the dancing girl, the starry-eyed poor confectioner with big dreams and bigger odds against him, and lots and lots of sweets — all against the stately backdrop of 19 century Calcutta (now Kolkata) under British rule. It describes itself as the "bittersweet" birth story of Bengal's "most loved culinary invention."
