Shubhra Shankhwalker Cooks a Forgotten Goan Saraswat Recipe

At Goya, celebrating home cooks and recipes have always been at the heart of our work. Through our series, #1000Kitchens, we document recipes from kitchens across the country, building a living library of heirloom recipes that have been in the family for 3 generations or more. In this edition, Joanna Lobo meets home chef and founder of Aai’s in Goa, Shubhra Shankhwalker who cooks Dudhyachi Bhaji Uss Ghalun, a vibrant Goan Hindu winter dish of pumpkin and sugarcane stir fry with coconut and hog plum.

This season’s stories are produced in partnership with the Samagata Foundation—a non-profit that champions meaningful projects.

“I like feeding people.”

That could well be Shubhra Shankhwalker’s unofficial motto. You’d be hard-pressed to find a friend who doesn’t walk away from her home with tiffins of food. Mention a dish to her, and she will make it for you, and hand it over. Discuss pickles and soon, a jar will be sent home. Explain a craving for patoleo (steamed rice, coconut and jaggery sweet) and she will wake up early to make it for you.

There is zero wastage in Shubhra’s home, because who would dare waste such delicious food?

My first encounter with Shubhra is at her home in Taleigão, a suburb neighbouring Goa’s capital, Panaji. It is an informal lunch. Around a table groaning under the weight of eight dishes, five of us — strangers to each other — form a bond where food is a delicious conduit.

Our second meeting at her house is for work, but her warmth is unchanged. This time too, there is a feast. “I know I’ve to cook pumpkin, but I got fresh fish in the market, and managed to get good gaboli (fish roe) so I had to make it,” she greets me. Dressed in a comfortable blue kurta, her face lights up with a smile behind her trademark frames (today, they are red), and she brandishes a plate of roe.

It has been four years since that lunch, and while the layout of her home has changed — a collection of garrafões and pots are prominent now — the kitchen is the same.

It is a busy kitchen. One table top has vegetables, spices and other produce. In a corner is fov (beaten rice), strained and ready to make that Diwali special, dhaiyatle fov — we discussed it a month ago, so naturally, she had to make it. A plate of stacked xevto or striped grey mullet, is a sight for sore eyes. One handi has mackerel uddamethi, a deep curry made with urad dal and methi. A light takachi kadhi sits golden in a bowl, next to a vibrant rasam-like saar. Away from the hullabaloo, sunning themselves in the balcony are her two cats, Chandramukhi and Pumpkin. “Diah [her daughter] couldn’t think of a name for the cat. I gave her a deadline and said if you don’t name her by then, she is going to be called Chandramukhi,” she laughs.

On her dining table, on a round wooden platter, Shubhra lays out the ingredients for the dish that is to be the hero of the meal. Dudhyachi Bhaji Uss Ghalun is a simple stir-fry of pumpkin, sugarcane, coconut, and hog plum. “I learned this from my mother-in-law, my Aai,” she says. Anyone who meets Shubhra immediately learns two things about her: she loves feeding people, and she owes much of her cooking prowess to her mother-in-law. “What I am today is mainly because of her. My mother gave me birth, but she nurtured me. She taught me how to buy fish, how to cook it, and which ingredient to focus on.”

Much of these teachings come to the fore at Aai’s, her home catering and cooking venture. Shubhra launched Aai’s in 2017 for her mother who wanted more pocket-money. “I told her instead of making and distributing pickles to everyone, let’s sell them,” she says. The pickles did well, and they graduated to taking orders, and sending out tiffins. But shortly after, her mother gave up. “I think she couldn’t handle the pressure.”

By that time, a married Shubhra was already cooking for her family and improving her skills under her mother-in-law, Saroj Shankhwalker’s tutelage. “She encouraged me to keep going with Aai’s. I will teach you.” And Shubhra did, forgoing a career in graphic designing to cook full-time.

Aai’s focuses on the food of her community, the Gaud Saraswat Brahmins. One of the largest Hindu communities in the state, their food is often mistakenly lumped under ‘Goan Hindu food’. As part of Aai’s, she crafts a luxurious sit-down lunch at her in-laws’ farm in Camurlim, a small village in the north of Goa.

There’s a slight quiver to Shubhra’s voice as she talks about her Aai, who passed away in 2023. The last few years have been filled with losses: both her mothers, her dog, and a neighbour whose house she grew up in, and whom she affectionately called Mami.

Through it all, Shubhra has continued cooking.

Today, the name Aai’s encapsulates both the women she considers her mothers, and whose photos adorn a shelf at her flat’s entrance. “They are my inspiration,” she says.

Perhaps the best way she is immortalising them is through her food.

Beyond Aai’s, Shubhra is collating recipes — a practice she started in 2003 — and hopes to put them together in a book. Written in a neat scrawl, Shubhra’s recipes are a document of all that she has learned and wishes to pass on to her daughter. There are notes, handy hints and surprisingly, no measurements. “I didn’t learn to cook with measurements. Aai would say things like one muth (approx. handful) and that was it,” she says.

Watching Shubhra cook is a joy. Everything happens with practised ease. She carries on a conversation and cooks without pause. The only breaks she takes is to photograph the food for her Instagram account.

She cooks the pumpkin at the end of the morning. The sugarcane is cleaned first — she only buys the black ones. “The difficulty is in cleaning the sugarcane,” she says, using a sharp knife to remove the skin. Only the middle part of the sugarcane, which is softer, goes into the bowl. “You cut them in big pieces because they absorb the flavours better.” Next is the pumpkin — “it has to be the gavti [local] variety.”

This recipe was beloved to her Aai. “After the Vhodli Diwali (or Tulsi Lagin) puja, she would look at the sugarcane and say, ‘somebody get me gavti [local] pumpkin’. It was odd. I wondered why she would obsess about it. She told me the sugarcane gave her a craving for this bhaji.”

Last year, just after Diwali, when Shubhra saw sugarcane in the market, she subconsciously imitated her Aai: “Somebody get me gavti pumpkin and hog plum”.

This is a special recipe — she has not seen it in cookbooks or even heard people talk about it. It has no garlic or onion, like many of her Aai’s other recipes. We sit and eat it together, accompanied by rice, tomato saar, dhaiyatle fov, fish fry, gaboli fry, takachi kadi, and uddamethi.

Anyone who has eaten Shubhra’s food can easily say it is one of the best meals to be found in Goa. Though she has done pop-ups across the country, Goa remains special. “I don’t think I can ever leave Goa. I feel very privileged to live in a place that has these kinds of ingredients, and a variety of fish,” she says. “The food I cook here cannot be replicated anywhere else. When I cook here, everything comes together,” she says.

SHUBHRA SHANKHWALKER’S DUDHYACHI BHAJI USS GHALUN

Ingredients

1 tsp mustard seeds
A pinch of hing
2 green chillies
Handful of grated coconut
Jaggery and salt to taste
One wedge of pumpkin, adjust according to taste
12 inch of sugarcane

Method

In a kadai, add coconut oil, then mustard seeds and hing.
Once you the mustard splutters, add a little water, tamarind pulp, slit green chillies, jaggery, salt and sugarcane.
Cook for 20 minutes along with the hog plum.
Lastly add the pumpkin to the sugarcane and allow it to cook.
Once cooked, add grated coconut.
Cook for a few more minutes and then serve.

Words by Joanna Lobo. Images by Daniel D’Souza Illustration by Tasneem Amiruddin.
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