Sweet, Sour and Spicy
The
famous Goan cuisine is steeped in history dating back to
centuries and has a
dash of religion, too
Xacutti.
Recheado. Xeque xeque. Ambot tik. Feijoada. Sorpotel.
Never before have I
been so semantically food stumped.
Amidst the whiff of coconut, the hiss of
an oven and
the sizzle in a wok inside Goa Marriott Resort & Spa's colos
sal kitchen,
I was faltering with inflexion and diphthong of typical Goan
dishes.
“It is spelt with `x' but xacutti is pro nounced shacuti.
It stems from
Portu guese chacuti,“ Rajdeep Singh, chef de cuisine, was being
my pronunciation master for the day. “Recheado in Portu guese
means `stuffed'
and sorpotel is lit erally `confusion' in Portuguese.
“ Every thing was
getting lost in translation. I immediately clung
to sorpotel. Not the dish
sorpotel. But the noun! I really was
confused; that moment in Marriott, Goan
food was a mish-mash
in my head like the sorpotel which is a muddle of pork
heart, liver
and pork blood.
Executive chef Anupam Gulati stepped in. Not with recipes.
With histo ry, instead. The Portuguese introduced chilli, potato,
tomato and
pineapple to India, reigned over Goa for nearly 400
years and rustled a new
cuisine for the locals. Kinda. The Portuguese
shunned yeast and introduced
palm toddy as a fermentation essential;
vinegar a must keep, pao an everyday
breakfast and cut lery acquired
a customary stance -knife on the right, fork
on the left, spoon in front.
Pork and beef were luxuries for the rich new
converts and the Anglo
Portuguese Treaty of 1878 gave the locals a taste of
tea and coffee.
The decree of Afonso de Albuquerque, Goa's conqueror,
permitting
mixed marriages between Portuguese men and local women, melded
the
ancient Hindu cuisine with traditional Portuguese Christian food.
That balmy October afternoon, in the bustle of a five-star
kitchen,
history was being rustled. Suddenly, Anupam's voice was drowned
in
the whirr of a grinding machine. Jecinta Fernandes (everyone
calls her Aunty)
was roasting cloves, fat fennel, red chillies, pepper
corns, fenugreek,
scraped coconut, ginger and garlic in a flat wok
to make the perfect xacutti
masala. Every alternate day, Aunty
walks into Goa Marriott, ties a black
white striped apron, fixes the
toque, measures the spices, switches on the
automated 10kg capacity
grinder and churns the xacutti masala for two hours.
Non-stop.Two
hours continuously? I dropped a jaw. “That's to make the masala
really
smooth,“ Aunty put it simply. “Spices for peri-peri take longer.
Three
hours, at least,“ Aunty added hastily. She'd know best. Call her
Goa
Marriott's spice headmistress.
It was in the clatter of the grinding machine that
Anupam's voice
faded and my Goan food history lesson ended. Abruptly. And a
lavish
meal was laid in the Waterfront restaurant which sits coquettishly by
the
Arabian Sea. On the banana leaf was poi (whole wheat bread, hollow inside
and dusted with bran), sannas (spongy rice cakes; almost like idli); pao
(Goan bread); cafreal (spicy chicken dish); balchao (curry made with shrimp
paste),
xacutti and a bowl of Goan brown rice called ukade. So much? I
marvelled. It could feed a hungry town. “There's dodol and bebinca
as
dessert.“ Rajdeep tempted me with those melt-in-mouth layered
bebinca which
is a modified version of bibingka made in Malaysia,
the Philippines and
Indonesia.God forgot to pack a sweet tooth for me but as the salty breeze
flirted with my long hair, I almost defied the meal protocol -I wanted to
have the 16-layered bebinca first which was named after Sister Bebiana
who
accidentally invented the dessert. Or so the story goes.
I stuck to the meal protocol. In the main course, I was
eyeing the
xacutti; its gravy fiery red. The original Portuguese xacutti is
dark
brown (`chacuti' literally is dark brown in Portuguese) but the Goan
xacutti is bright red. The xacutti spices include freshly roasted coconut,
dry red chilli, cumin and mustard seeds, cloves, green cardamom and
palm
jaggery. To get the perfect xacutti, Rajdeep walked into local
homes to pick
the secret of the best xacutti in town.
In a xacutti-making cook-off, an old
Goan woman ran away with
the trophy. Her trick: To add freshly ground coconut
and coriander
just before serving. Trust me, this xacutti could satiate a
hungry god.
I am not sure about the gods but satiated in the green red
upholstered
Waterfront restaurant, I returned to questions. And to the
Portuguese
reign (1510 1961), when many traditional food habits were
discarded, new ones added and recipes modified to suit the needs of the
rulers and the ruled. Not surprisingly, religion stepped into the kitchen.
While the new Christian
converts took to using vinegar for taste and as
preservative, the Hindus
and Muslims never used vinegar in cooking. While the
Christians used
tomatoes by the dozen to make scrumptious dishes such as
tomatieache bhaji, chillifries, curries, Goan stew, there was no
tomato in a
Hindu household until second half of the 20th century.
History tells us that
it was a typhoid epidemic that compelled Hindus
to eat tomatoes -typhoid
patients were prescribed cod liver oil.
The taste was so unpleasant that the
doctors advised mixing cod
liver oil with tomato juice. That's how tomatoes
entered the Hindu
kitchen! That October night, curled in the Room 215, I
dreamt
I was a Goa Marriott chef -a black white apron around my waist,
a
crisp toque as a crown and countless errand boys scraping,
grating, cutting,
chopping and slicing ingredients for a lavish
Christmas meal. The Xa cutti
masala simmering in a wok, cafreal
spices getting smoothened in the grinding
machine, egg yolks
beaten fluffy, red chillies shrivelling in smoking hot
oil; coconut milk
and jaggery blending for the dodol, the pao puffing proudly
in the oven.
The guest list: Angels were trooping down from heaven.
Suddenly,
a shriek tore through the kitchen. I had lost the bebinca recipe.
I
woke up startled. I rubbed sleep -and dream -off my eyes.
Reality returned. Anupam Gulati, Rajdeep Singh and Aunty
were in the kitchen layering a
perfect bebinca.
I waited by the door. Greedily.
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Preeti Verma Lal
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ETM1FEB15
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