Fifty years on, Matajihat's sponge sweet still melts hearts

Press a piece of this rasgulla with a finger and it gives way. Bite into it and it gives way again. The sweet comes from Matajihat, a market in Raigaon union of Mahadebpur upazila in Naogaon, and people there judge it by that softness before they judge it by anything else.

It needs only a finger.

The market meets on Wednesdays, and over the years the sweet has travelled beyond it. Rasgulla is hardly rare in Bangladesh. Bhanga, Jhalakathi, Faridpur and Habiganj all have versions they defend with pride. What sets this one apart is its softness, and the local name says so.

Because it is as soft as a sponge and is sold at Matajihat, people began calling it 'Matajir sponge mishti'. There was no meeting and no announcement.

Nobody put the words on a signboard. They passed from mouth to mouth and stayed. For more than fifty years, families in the area have chosen it for their celebrations and for the guests who come to their houses.

Fifty years is a long time for a reputation to hold. Tastes change, shops open and close, and a market town can look different from one decade to the next. The sweet at Matajihat has gone through all of that without changing what it is: a round ball in syrup that gives way at the lightest pressure.

The man who started it was Ganesh Chandra Mondal, of Kundana village in Mahadebpur. Every Wednesday, on market day, he set up a stall at Matajihat and sold sweets. Local craftsmen say he was the first to sell a rasgulla this soft. 

Word of his sweets got around, sales grew, and one stall a week stopped being enough. He built a mud house in the market and opened a shop. He had come for a day. He ended up staying for good.

What he made, and what his family still makes, depends on patience more than on any secret. The household keeps more than twenty cows. Milk from its own animals is joined by milk from local dairymen, and every day forty to fifty kilograms of it goes onto a wood fire, comes to the boil and is left to cool. 

The milk is then curdled into chhana. Once the whey has drained away, the curd turns crumbly. Small round balls are shaped from it and cooked in a syrup of boiled sugar.

There is a logic in the order of it. Fire first, then cold, then separation, then shape, then syrup. 

At each point something is taken away or softened: the heat is allowed to leave, the water is allowed to drain, the sugar is allowed to settle in. By the end, nothing in it is left hard.

After Ganesh died, the shop passed to his sons, Fotik Chandra Mondal and Rupak Chandra Mondal, who have run it for the past ten years. Until then the shop had no name. People called it Ganesh's sweet shop, and nobody needed more than that. 

The sons eventually gave it one, Ma Mistanno Bhandar, but the name that mattered had been settled long before. The signboard is the newest thing about the place.

Fotik credits his father. 'My father was the first to make sponge rasgulla in this region,' he says. Cattle have been raised in their home for as long as he can remember. As he describes it, the proof is simple.

'Press the sweets with a finger, or bite into one,' he says, 'and it feels as soft as a sponge.'

The method did not stay in one family. Many people learned it from Ganesh and opened shops of their own, so more than one shop in Matajihat now sells the sponge sweet. Even so, the demand for the sweets from Ganesh's shop remains the highest. The method travelled, but the customers, on the evidence of the demand, stayed where they were.

Today the shop sells sixty to seventy kilograms of sweets on an average day. Sweet shops in the neighbouring upazilas buy from it and sell on. When there is a wedding or some other function, large orders come in. 

Altogether, five to six maunds of sponge rasgulla are made in the shop every day. It is a long way from one stall on one day of the week.

The praise from those who know it is consistent. Arifur Rahman, former principal of Raigaon College, calls the syrup-filled sponge rasgulla of Matajihat a traditional sweet and says that a single taste is never enough.

Saiful Islam, who comes from Rajbari and works for a private organisation in Naogaon, carries it home. 'When I travel from Naogaon to Rajbari, I take these rasgullas for the members of my family,' he says. 'Anyone who eats this sweet once will want it again and again.'

A man leaves Naogaon for Rajbari, where his family lives, and the sweet goes with him as a gift. It is a small errand, but it is how a regional sweet gets carried beyond its region, one visit at a time.

A sweet this soft ought not to last half a century, and yet this one has outlived its founder, passed into his sons' hands and survived the arrival of other shops selling the same thing. Hard things tend to crack at moments like these.

This one has gone on giving: under a finger, to anyone who learned to make it, to a family in Rajbari. Even its name was given by the people who ate it.

On a Sunday in Matajihat, a piece of the sweet will still sit in someone's palm and be pressed lightly. It will give, as it has given since Ganesh Chandra Mondal first set out his stall, and the verdict will be the same as ever.

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