Have you ever heard of halwa nagori?” Gunjan Goela asks me. My bewildered expression must have been answer enough, because Goela does not pause. “You know, this is one of the reasons why I decided to specialise in purani dilli ka khana. Not many people know about it outside the baniya community yet, it’s still the best place for traditional snacks and sweets,” she says, explaining how the halwa nagori is a treat with small crispy puris made of sooji, teamed with a spicy aloo sabzi and sooji halwa, that gives you a taste of the hot, the spicy and the sweet. The 50-year-old, who runs a catering unit, Dilli Ka Khana, specialises in the traditional cuisine of Delhi, and also doubles up as a food historian, taking people out on heritage food walks in the Walled City.

Goela’s catering service was born over a decade ago, after a casual conversation with friends on their respective regional cuisine. A food festival in Dilli Haat later, Goela’s expertise with traditional old Delhi food was snapped up by the ITC group of hotels, for which she conducted festivals. “I come from a family of foodies, where the men were greater connoisseurs than the women. In fact, though my mother taught me the basics of cooking, it was my dad who taught me the finer nuances,” she says. Growing up in a large joint family in Old Delhi also meant there were many people to hand down closely guarded family recipes. “Khichdi in my family are still cooked in milk and even today we don’t use a pressure cooker for dal. It’s cooked in a brass pot,” she says.

The old city is a familiar haunt and Goela reels off names of places where one can go for the best in everything from mattra and kulche to chhole bature. Although her family is vegetarian, Goela eats meat, “because as a professional, I need to know about various kinds of tastes.” Her specialty includes Awadhi, Baniya, Mughlai and Punjabi dishes, but it’s vegetarian cuisine that gives her a lot of satisfaction. “Things like methi ki chutney and matar aur khoya are almost lost now, but a staple wedding menu 40 years ago would have featured them,” she says. Goela, in fact, distills these traditional recipes and incorporates them in her menu. While she takes in orders for weddings and corporate events, she caters for small parties as well. “But you need to give me a minimum notice of about five days,” she says.