A Very Cashew Affair

Join Us As We Go On A Cashew Trail In Goa…

- Preeti Verma Lal

Anacardium occidentale. That’s the name. I stood under that tree in Goa. Anacardium occidentale? That’s the botanical name of the cashew tree. The tree laden with fruits. Countless fruits. Red. Yellow. Green. Burnished orange. A few scattered and bruised on the ground. Each fruit with one nut dressed in a charcoal sheath. Hard shell with resinous filling. There is nothing true about the Anacardium occidentale fruit. It is a false fruit – not a fruit but a swollen stalk with the nut dangling precariously outside. In the Tivim cashew farm of Cedric and Mac Vaz, vintage cars had lined up to mark the beginning of the Cashew Trail, an eight-day annual festival by Park Hyatt Goa Resort & Spa that harks back to the old legend of cashew.

Standing under the cashew tree, I stepped back in time. Cut to the year 1510. The year the Portuguese landed in Goa and brought along the sapling of a cashew tree that originated in Brazil, with poison ivy, pistachio and mango as distant cousins. Nearly 500 years after the first cashew tree was planted, cashew reigns over Goa. It is everywhere. That one balmy afternoon I decided to don a million cashew roles – a cashew picker, an apple stomper, a feni distiller, a nut cracker, cashew chef… It all began with a red cashew apple. Cashew apples are considered a delicacy in Brazil. To know that cashew-craziness, I chewed into a fresh red fruit. It is gooey, juicy, sweet with an alluring hint of wooziness. The next step: de-seed the apple, set the nuts aside and throw the fruits in a rock pit (colmbi) and stomp barefoot to get the juices flowing. I baulked at the idea of an impromptu cashew juice pedicure. Sure, I was game for it. I rolled up my dungaree, jumped into the pit, held a rope and stomped and stomped; the juice trickling into an earthen pot.