With a bunch of carefree Goan friends spicing up my college days, there was no way I could escape their cuisine. Goans are nothing if not obsessed with food and drink. Why else would they make painstaking dishes like the dessert called bebinca which requires hours of layering!
Goan fish curry rice!!
If in those years I believed that Goan cuisine was a homogenous mix of Portuguese and Indian, I was being pretty naive. For as I learnt later, there’s a mix of many cultures in their cuisine, drawing from the Hindu, Christian and even Muslim facets of their people.
But getting into the geopolitics of cuisine doesn’t make it any more flavourful, so lets concentrate on the food itself! Goan cuisine has such a beguilingly distinct, fiery combination of spicy flavours that nothing quite compares. I was actually disappointed to find that Brazil, with a common Portuguese colonial connection, ended up with a fairly bland cuisine. I guess India alters everyone and everything to her own tastes!
Goan cuisine uses a familiarly south European set of ingredients: meats and chicken, seafood and spicy sausages, besides the entire gamut of vegetables. But the end result —delicacies like the Pork Vindaloo and Sorpotel, Chicken Xacuti and Cafreal, Prawn Balchao, Caldeirada & Racheido — are nothing like the mellow flavours of the Mediterranean or the Iberian peninsula! But clearly they have captured palates and hearts far beyond the Malabar coast….
Last year, a half-Goan, half Anglo-Indian lady in Britain won a nationwide contest for “homestyle” cuisine with her recipe for Pork Vindalho. And if you’re wondering why the spelling is different, its because Vindaloo is now the common Brit word for a certain degree of hot “curry”, rather than a specific dish from Goa! I don’t think it will be long before dishes like Sorpotel get their own fan following, considering it’s better tasting than any Spanish chorizo concoction I’ve ever had.
Which brings us to feni, the Goan liquor that is absolutely essential to their lifestyle. Europeans and tourists wax eloquent about ouzo in Greece and arack in west Asia as being essential for the total experience. So also feni, both made of coconut and cashew. And even for non feni drinkers, the vinegar form is a must for that tang in Goan food. Go Goa, is what this foodie forsees!
Courtesy: ET
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