Documenting Family Recipes & Publishing Your Cookbook

The Goya Journal leads a conversation with Ummi Abdullah, first lady of Mappila cuisine, and her granddaughter, Nazaneen, authors of the Mappila cookbook, A Kitchen Full of Stories; and Kathija Hashim and her daughter, Aysha Tanya, of The Malabar Tea Room, as they share their personal insights on the challenges and joys of creating a family cookbook.

Hosted at The Ritz-Carlton Bangalore, we met to discuss the documentation of family recipes, preservation of heirloom dishes and regional cuisine, learning from the experts over a spectacular high tea featuring Mappila specialities from the cookbooks.

More photographs of the event here.

Rani O'Ranna: A Dinner to Celebrate the Ordinary

A long-table dinner under the stars, conceptualised and curated by The Goya Journal in collaboration with LIPI, Bangalore's hyper-local ingredient-centric restaurant, at THE COURTYARD, a stunning art space in the heart of the city.

The dinner marked the launch of artist Rakshita Mittal's debut collection, Rani O'Ranna, a poignant series of portraits that capture Bengali women in their kitchens. The 7-course dinner by the visionaries at Lipi translated the artist's themes from the lens to the plate, bringing together a thoughtful marriage of art and food. The workshop was ticketed on Insider.in.

More photographs of the event here.

Trash Talk: A Culinary Workshop on Zero-Waste Cooking

This interactive workshop curated by Goya Media at The Smoke Co. Bangalore, featured chef & mixologist Arina Suchde who advocates for better food choices through sustainable and all-natural practices in the kitchen and bar. Sharing her expertise on cooking root-to-shoot, and eating ethically sourced foods, Arina demonstrated 5 recipes made entirely of 'waste' kitchen ingredients, such as peels, seeds, stems and rinds. 

The workshop was ticketed on Insider.in and participants got to sample all of Arina's delicious creations, as well recipes to recreate these dishes at home. This time, the much-coveted Goya Goody Bag featured products that shared the themes of sustainability and ethical foods. We are so proud to partner with these brands and their products: apple cider vinegar by Conscious Foods, curating organic and natural Indian foods; millet chocolate pancake mix by Slurrp Farms, a brand founded by two incredible women promoting forgotten, healthy foods and recipes for the future; Black Baza Coffee, an organisation that works at the grassroots with small farmers in Karnataka; and jars of Rock Bee Honey from another Goya favourite, Timbaktu Organic.

More pictures up on Facebook.

Cookbook Club: Midsummer Mango Party

The summer edition of the Goya Cookbook Club featured mango dishes from all over the country (and world — hello Raw Mango Salad and Mango & Aubergine Soba Noodles!). We gathered in Third Wave Coffee Roasters one rainy evening for some excellent food, live music and fun conversation fuelled by mango kombucha. Our guests took home  goodie bags with products from our favourite Bangalore brands, Bare Necessities, Third Wave Coffee Roasters and Mubeena Shariff Chocolatier. 

Find more pictures from the event here. 

Cookbook Club: Winter Edition

The December 2017 cookbook club potluck featured dishes from Nigel Slater’s Christmas Chronicles, a tome of recipes that capture the spirit of the season perfectly. The menu featured dishes such as roasted leg of lamb, cardamom and banana cake, roasted sausages with vegetables, cheese crackers, and poached pears amongst others. Held at the OLIE store, the night also featured a hot chocolate-fuelled carolling session. Purchase the book here.

View more pictures here.

Workshop: The Goya Journal Guide to Good Food Writing

In collaboration with Pooja Dhingra's Studio Fifteen, Goya Media conducted a  workshop for amateur writers interested in food writing. The three-hour interactive workshop mapped a beginner's guide to creating quality content for media publications. Using resources within food journalism, participants break down and understand the elements of good writing, tools in digital media, techniques to develop a strong voice, and learn how to construct a story. It concludes with a peer-reviewed exercise in writing. 

Cookbook Club: Suriani Kitchen Edition

For this edition of the Goya Cookbook Club in collaboration with Penguin India, we chose Lathika George’s Suriani Kitchen, a wonderful, evocative account of the Suriani community from the vibrant state of Kerala. With more than 20 participants, this potluck held at the sprawling Nicobar store in the heart of Bengaluru featured more than 16 dishes from the book, ranging from the simple bitter gourd chips to more complex dishes like mango payasam and ari ada. An afternoon of fun, conversation and of course, heart-stoppingly delicious Suriani dishes, each participant received a copy of the cookbook to continue their exploration of the Suriani cuisine.

View more photos here.

Cookbook Club: Nostalgia Edition

This edition of the cookbook club featured Archana Pidathala’s Andhra cookbook, Five Morsels of Love, a wonderful tribute to her grandmother. The theme for this potluck in the park was to bring along a dish made from a recipe passed down from your grandmother — a fitting tribute to grandmothers everywhere, especially a certain one that inspired the gorgeous cookbook, Five Morsels of Love. 

See more photographs from the event here.

Cookbook Club: Enid Blyton's Midnight Feast Edition

Our midnight feast pyjama party was our end-of-the-year event, drawing inspiration from the midnight feasts that featured often in the much-loved Enid Blyton books. The feast that took place after dark featured favourites like shortbread, scones, pigs in blankets, jelly and pot pies. Socialising in pyjamas, we discovered, has its own charm! 

See more photographs from the party here. 

Potluck in the Park

For Goya's first Cookbook Club lunch, we chose a cookbook that is a culinary classic: Madhur Jaffrey’s Flavours of India - a book that should be part of every serious Indian cook's collection, not only for its extensive coverage of regional Indian cuisine, but also because it was Madhur Jaffrey who, in many ways, gave Indian cooking a global stage.

Madhur Jaffrey who moved to London to study drama and pursue a career in acting, found that she missed home-cooked food and asked her mother to send her recipes – she learnt to cook entirely through correspondence. Interestingly, Madhur Jaffrey almost never stepped into the kitchen prior to her time in London, and almost failed cooking at school. Her editor, Judith Jones, asserts that this is what made her an ideal cookbook writer – that she only learned to cook childhood comfort food as an adult. 

To supplement her income as an actor (Shakespeare Wallah is a Goya favourite!), Madhur Jaffrey began writing about food. This accidental foray into food writing was a serendipitous one. She was discovered by legendary editor Judith Jones (credited with introducing the world to Julia Child), and published her first cookbook to phenomenal success. The rest is culinary history. Her TV shows have become staple in the study of Indian cuisine. So it was only fitting that we begin with a Madhur Jaffrey cookbook.

The Goya Cookbook Club was initiated to reaffirm the importance of cookbooks in the digital age. While yes, you could probably find every recipe ever written through a gentle Google prompt, cookbooks play a much deeper role in the preservation of a community's culinary culture, documenting that vital part of the human experience – how we eat. 

The cookbook lunch was a potluck-picnic in Cubbon Park; everyone brought along a dish they cooked from the Flavours of India cookbook. The menu featured Goan style lamb chilli-fry, Chettinad pepper chicken, Punjabi chaanp masala (lamb chops), Kerala-style nadan khozi or country chicken curry, and Bengali malai prawn curry. We sipped on cold ginger-lemon squash and camped out on a blanket under the dappled shade of a bamboo grove. Among the sepia-toned fallen leaves of October, it felt very much like a Merchant-Ivory afternoon.