In Goa’s Chorao Island, a Community Kitchen Is Reconnecting People With Ancestral Food Wisdom

On a warm afternoon on Goa’s Chorão Island, sunlight streamed through the slatted roof of a centuries-old kulagar — a traditional homestead garden system — where generations of families have worked, stored, and cooked. 

Advertisment

Add The Better India As A Trusted Source

Smoke rose gently from a wood-fired chulha. The scent of freshly grated coconut mingled with turmeric and jaggery. A stone adoli (coconut scraper) sat in the centre like a relic with a pulse. Around it, strangers — urban professionals, travellers, home cooks — leaned in, sleeves rolled, grinding soaked rice into a smooth paste.

This scene was from a community kitchen workshop conducted by Heritage First Goa on November 24. However, the courtyard felt less like a demonstration and more like someone’s memory.

Historian and curator Amreen Shaikh had imagined it to be exactly this: a living, breathing experience where Goan food wasn’t just demonstrated but felt, where tools weren’t props but teachers, and where community kitchens could become a bridge between worlds. 

“For me, food has always been one of the most honest storytellers of a community,” says Amreen, whose work with her venture, Origins & Horizons, is dedicated to designing experiences around local voices and living heritage. 

“When Heritage First Goa approached me, it aligned beautifully with our mission. This workshop felt like a bridge between research and lived reality.”

Her goal was clear: to shift the narrative. 

“There’s a noticeable gap in how we speak about Goa’s tribal communities. Their food heritage, especially, rarely finds visibility,” she explains. “The story we wanted to address was simple yet urgent: that tribal food is not ‘alternate’ or ‘primitive’, it is ecological, sustainable, scientific, and incredibly relevant today.”

The workshop, conceived as this bridge, was held in a kulagar — a cultivated grove on Chorao Island that is a living textbook of Goa’s indigenous ecology. This was the home of Macchindranath Arjun Kauthankar, fondly called as Kaka, a farmer whose family has nurtured this land for five generations.

“I was very much excited,” Kaka recalls of being approached for the workshop. “The very notion of someone conversing about the heritage work. I'm carrying forward this legacy from my father, mother, grandfather, and grandmother.” For him, this was more than an event; it was the continuation of a lineage.

The rhythm of community

The afternoon began not with cooking, but with context. Amreen shared the history of Goa’s earliest settlers, the tribes who shaped its agrarian landscape. Then, Kaka took over, leading the group through the grove, pointing out indigenous plants and sharing generational knowledge.

Soon, the tranquil kulagar was filled with the sounds of collaborative effort. The workshop was intentionally hands-on. Participants gathered around traditional tools: the adoli for grinding coconut and the massive grinding stone, rogdo, for crushing masalas.

“It was beautiful because we were all so hungry,” says writer and workshop participant Rupangi Sharma, laughing, recalling the scene. 

“We had groups doing different tasks — stone grinding, coconut grinding, cutting vegetables. There was a bit of performance anxiety, but we were all cheerleading each other on. That feeling… It’s just so human. Everybody's hungry, and you're cooking together. It really ended up feeling like a family.”

The air was filled with the fragrant smoke of open fires and the sizzle of polle (a type of dosa) on heavy cast-iron pans. The menu was a tribute to tribal wisdom: khatkhate, a hearty vegetable stew with a coconut-and-jaggery base, and kasai, a healing herbal concoction.

A poignant moment of connection occurred when Kaka’s wife (often called kaki) and the home chef demonstrated the grinding technique. 

“We were holding it so tenderly,” Rupangi remembers, “and she was at it like a machine. We realised the capacity needed when you do it daily. It's manual labour, it's hard. Kaki was showing us the way.”

The healing power of a shared meal

As the golden hour approached, the group sat down together in a covered area that opened out to green paddy fields. The food they had prepared with their own hands was laid out before them.

This was the moment Amreen had hoped for. “There was a stillness, an energy shift,” she observes. “Food collapses distances. You can listen to a story, but when you taste something, it enters your body, and it becomes part of you. It carries emotion, nostalgia and geography in a single bite.”

This immersive, multi-sensory experience is key to Amreen's curatorial philosophy at Origins & Horizons. 

"In a world where we talk about sustainability and slow living," she notes, "these communities have been practising both long before the world found words for them. Their food habits show us that sustainability doesn’t need modern innovation; it often needs a return to ancestral wisdom."

For the participants, this wisdom was both ecological and personal. Rupangi found a sense of healing and belonging, noting how the shared effort and the traditional remedies like kasai made her feel part of the community. 

This is the essence of what Kaka calls the “beauty of the real community kitchen.” He reflects, “The recipe itself, I believe, binds the Indians. It is beyond the realms of caste, creed, religion… When we exchange food culture, we enjoy together. That’s when it goes to another level.”

A lasting legacy on a single plate

The workshop did more than teach recipes; it fostered a profound sense of belonging and a new perspective on heritage.

For Amreen, the day was a powerful reminder. “Standing in the kulagar, listening to Kaka, I felt a sense of continuity that no document can capture,” she shares. “I realised how much heritage depends on these everyday moments of connection. It reaffirmed why I built Origins & Horizons: to create experiences that honour the people who are custodians of knowledge, to protect intangible heritage, and to make history something you can touch, taste, and carry home.”

And for Kaka, the sixth-generation farmer, the cycle continues. “It makes me truly happy to serve people with love,” he says, his voice warm with pride. 

In his kulagar, with the scent of roasted spices and earth in the air, heritage was not a relic of the past, but a living, breathing, and deliciously shared present.

Here’s an easy recipe for Goan herbal drink Kasai:

Ingredients (serves 2):

2 cups water
1 tbsp coriander seeds
1 tsp cumin seeds
4–5 black peppercorns
1 small piece of ginger (crushed)
4–5 tulsi (holy basil) leaves
1 small piece of cinnamon (optional)
Jaggery or honey to taste

Method:

In a pot, bring water to a boil.

Add coriander seeds, cumin, peppercorns, ginger, and cinnamon.

Let it simmer on low heat for 8–10 minutes until the water reduces slightly.

Add tulsi leaves and simmer for another 1–2 minutes.

Strain into cups and sweeten with jaggery or honey.

Serve hot. Kasai is a warming, soothing Goan remedy — perfect for colds, digestion, and monsoon evenings.

All images from the Heritage First Goa team.