Nothing 'fishy' about it! Once limited to marginalised communities, shellfish is making a grand comeback in Indian gourmet circles
Nerul, a village close to the mouth of the Mandovi River in Goa, it’s time to celebrate clams. The sands of the riverbed and shore are ideal places to find tisriyo, small but very tasty shellfish. A village tradition has grown of gathering, cleaning, and cooking tisriyo on this day. It isn’t a religious event, though the local priest is happy to give blessings.
This is excellent, because shellfish should be celebrated in India far more than they are. North Kerala loves mussels and Indian oysters are now found in upmarket restaurants, but given the length of our coastline, we hardly seem to do justice to shellfish. They tend to have an unclean reputation, perhaps because they are found in mud and are often filled with it, or because some species can occasionally be toxic, depending on the waters from which they have been filtering food.
Shellfish have often been left to marginalised communities, as Dalit writer Urmila Pawar recalls in her memoir 'Aaydan: The Weave of My Life'. She writes of how women from her community would forage along coasts for oysters, make a small fire and place the shells on it, eating them as they opened. Foragers like this would have known the seasons when they were safe to eat and how to leave the smallest ones, so they could grow and reproduce.
In recent years, there have been complaints from parts of Goa, like Chicalim bay, of hordes descending on the sands to collect shellfish indiscriminately, attracted by the prospect of making easy money by harvesting tisriyo, because they have
