At the Serendipity Arts Festival, cultural anthropologist Ishita Dey hosted a session and tasting exploring the intertwined worlds of sweets, rituals, and gender in Goa.

In Goan culture, sweets are much more than festive treats — they are sacred markers of life’s cycles, seasons, and rites of passage. While some ritual sweets, like Bebinca and Doce, have become iconic, many others remain tucked away in domestic kitchens, passed down through generations of women, and rarely — if ever — seen in commercial spaces.

This intimate session featured a tasting of two such ritual sweets, prepared by home chefs Anjana Amonkar and Monica, offering participants a sensory and narrative journey through Goa’s ritual foodways.

Key highlights included:

• How ritual sweets are rooted in gendered ecologies, shaped by seasonality, household economies, and familial customs.

• Discussions on the invisible, often unrecognised labour of women in maintaining these culinary traditions, preserving recipes, and sustaining ritual practices through food.

• A reflection on how domestic kitchens act as custodians of intangible heritage, where recipes survive not through documentation but through memory, practice, and oral transmission.

Through storytelling, tasting, and conversation, the session unpacked how sweets, gender, and ritual are inseparable in Goan culture, and how these everyday acts of culinary care are powerful carriers of identity, belief, and community.