At the Mapusa morning market in Goa, Chef Anumitra Ghosh Dastidar pauses near a long tuber with tough skins. The vegetable had made her stop her otherwise fluid choreography through the market, in which she moves between fish stalls and vegetable sellers as if in a music video – arms reaching for fresh greens, questions being asked to vendors about their catch.
“So what do you think – should we cook it?” she asks about the tuber as I take notes and the others rack their brains to decide on this vegetable that they don’t recognise. “Is it a yam?” I ask, redundantly, and she nods patiently. “Yes, but a different kind,” she explains, choosing to buy it and ignoring us while we scramble for our wallets. She thanks the seller and holds the large cylindricalacross her shoulder like a light log of wood.
“I already had a large vocabulary of ingredients and foods from my upbringing in Bengali food. But when I learned to cook different cuisines, it was like parts of my brain lit up,” she says. “That is what travel does, I suppose, open your brain up to possibilities you may have known but not yet understood.” But, Dastidar reiterates, it is really from her “Bengali roots” that her journey in food grew.
As she bends down to scour for greens, the rest of us begin to play another game in which we try to answer one another’s prompts as to the ripeness of the vegetables among the bushes through which we walk. “I spy something with a T,” says Boruah “Tomato!” says Dakpa, and Dastidar laughs. “Turmeric? That is over there….” she says, gesturing toward the large leaves close to the fence.
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