Read & Listen: "Podcast: Shrimp in banana cake, saravle, macroli and Bombay Duck everywhere – Mumbai’s world of food"

[Vivek Pinto]

By: Dinyar Patel  [Dinyar Patel is an associate professor of history at the SP Jain Institute of Management and Research in Mumbai. His award-winning biography of 

Dadabhai Naoroji, Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism, was published by Harvard University Press in May 2020.]

Published in: Scroll

Date: May 6, 2026

Source: https://scroll.in/article/1092477/podcast-shrimp-in-banana-cake-saravle-macroli-and-bombay-duck-everywhere-mumbais-world-of-food

Note: Pleas access the source to read the listen to the podcast.

"Pronoti Datta [In the Beginning There Was Bombay Duck (Speaking Tiger, 2026)] uses food and restaurants as windows into Maximum City’s complex social and political landscape

Above all, Mumbai’s cuisine is adaptable. In Datta’s account, the figure of the Goan baker and chef constantly hovers in the background. Goans, long exposed to European ingredients and methods of cooking, were instrumental in shaping so much of the food we eat today. They staffed some of the city’s first prominent restaurants and labored in the kitchens of rich merchants and industrialists. Along the way, they took certain uninspired and insipid Western dishes and added a heady dose of masala. Perhaps, thanks to them, even today’s Chicken Cecilia is more palatable than its original form.

Through agents like the Goan chef, food in Mumbai became dazzlingly international."