Rasmalai

Rasmalai is a chilled sweet in which small, soft sweets made from chhena are soaked in sweetened, reduced milk. Both the dough inside and the liquid around it are made from milk, but each is processed differently. The dough is made from chhena, which is milk curdled with acid and drained of its whey. The liquid around it is milk thickened by evaporating its water. A spoonful brings the springy sweet and the thick milk into the mouth together.

Curdling the Milk and Thickening the Milk

Chhena is made by adding acid to milk to coagulate its proteins and draining off the whey. Kneading it, rolling it into balls and cooking them in syrup are steps that rasmalai shares with rasgulla. In rasmalai, however, the balls are not finished in the syrup. Instead, they are combined with sweetened concentrated milk. Materials on Indian dairy technology give a version made with flat, disc-shaped rasgulla as a typical example.

A flat shape gives a different thickness under the spoon than a thick ball does. It also changes how much milk is scooped up with each piece. Some rasmalai are made as small balls. In Cumilla, Bangladesh, a version with many small sweets in thickened milk is well known. A flat disc cut with a spoon and several small balls scooped up together combine the milk and the dough differently in a single bite.

The milk for the outside is reduced in a shallow open pan or similar vessel while being stirred. In one dairy technology example, the milk is first concentrated to about half its original volume and sugar is added at that stage. It is then reduced further to about one-third before the flat rasgulla are added. How far the milk is reduced and how sweet it is vary from maker to maker. In other words, this liquid is not simply the syrup used to cook the dough, turned white. Rasmalai has a separate step for building the flavor and thickness of the milk.

Once the sweetened concentrated milk and the chhena sweets are combined, they are heated briefly so that they blend, then cooled and refrigerated. The result is a cold dish in which the syrup-soaked dough and the concentrated milk have blended together. Kheer is made by cooking rice in milk. In rasmalai, by contrast, what the tip of the spoon meets is a small sweet made from kneaded milk protein.

Saffron or pistachios add a pale yellow or green to the white of the milk. Some versions use cardamom or rose water, but there is no single set combination of aromas. What matters most in explaining rasmalai is not whether saffron is used. It is the structure: the soft texture of chhena combined with sweet milk.

Rasmalai in a bowl. The sweets sit in sweet milk. Photo: Harpreet 712, 2023-12-07, location unknown. Original image / CC BY-SA 4.0. Downsized version from the hosting source; no further processing.

Two Commercial Histories in Bengal

The name rasmalai is linked to rosh or ras, meaning a sweet liquid, and malai, meaning the rich part of milk. The name reflects how the sweet is put together: a milk sweet set in sweet milk.

In Kolkata, there is a lineage associated with the name K.C. Das. According to the family’s history, the sweet was developed by Krishna Chandra Das and his son Sarada Charan Das. The family points to a 1932 advertisement as a record of its commercial launch. Meanwhile, in Cumilla, in present-day Bangladesh, people tell of the sweet shop Matri Bhandar in Monoharpur and its commercial expansion around 1930. Cumilla’s tradition is connected to the culture of kheerbhog, a milk sweet that combines chhena sweets with kheer made from reduced milk. In both Kolkata and Cumilla, the sweets developed in their own ways from milk-sweet techniques shared across the Bengal region.

One account of Matri Bhandar’s history says that brothers of the Sen family opened the shop in 1930. The shop also says that later generations changed the form and that the name changed from kheerbhog to rasmalai. In Cumilla’s history, making milk sweets at home, selling them in a shop and changing the name and form are described as events from different periods.

Cumilla’s rasmalai is also a food that people take home in a container: small sweets together with the liquid. Local newspapers report that it was once sold in earthen pots, then in polyethylene bags and later in plastic containers. The material of the container has changed, but the sweets are still sold together with the sweet milk.

Glossary