Goa’s dining scene may sober down at this time of the year, but it’s a great time to dive into the local Gaud Saraswat cuisine. Home chef Shubra Shankhwalker is currently curating a multi-course menu rich with monsoon specialties like colocasia, green amaranth, ferns, and wild mushrooms. For non-vegetarians, the meal could include river or estuarine fish and crustaceans like lady fish, pear spot, ribbon and silver fish, croaker, silver belly fish, crabs, clams, oysters, mussels, and prawns from wetlands and even snails!

Shankhwalker runs Aayi’s (meaning Mother’s), a catering service that specialises in cuisine from the Gaud Saraswat Brahmin community. The dining experience is often curated at the Ricemill Café in Morjim, or at homes and villas, as she prefers to serve her meals fresh and warm to preserve the flavours.

“I curate a four-five course meal. If it’s over 15 to 20 people, I offer a buffet. Smaller groups are the best, so I can source the freshest fish and ingredients from the local market,” she says. In fact, much of the produce comes from the family farm in Kamurle near Siolim.

Her next monsoon sit-down includes the season’s favourites–colocasia, backwater prawns, breadfruit, a lip-smacking hog plum curry, and lady fish curry, which she says tastes the best in monsoon. A wild mushroom xacuti, pearl spot fish curry and clam sukha are also available right now. Also on the plate will be a dish of colocasia leaves in coconut masala, jackfruit seeds, boiled peanuts and a simple local cucumber salad with coconut and mustard. For dessert, it’s mangane—channa dal, sabudana, fresh coconut milk, cashews, and roasted coconut flakes flavoured with turmeric leaf or a banana sweet.

Shankhwalker’s culinary experience is an attempt to popularise her community’s cuisine, which is not as popular outside the state, and one that she claims, is often misunderstood. “People think Goan GSB cuisine is vegetarian. It certainly is not—in fact, it is quite the opposite. Seafood plays a central role. Every season brings variations to the fish or crustacean, either as the focal dish or as a condiment or a relish.”

Going by the response, her attempt to evangelise the cuisine is working. “Changing anyone’s taste in food is perhaps the most difficult task,” says adman Piyush Pandey, now a Goa resident. “But one dinner at Shubra’s home 15 years ago changed mine to Goan Saraswat food.”

Source: CondeNast Traveler ( https://www.cntraveller.in/story/goa-gsb-food-experience-shubra-shankhwalker/ )