Goa & Gomantak · Western Coastal Strip
The everyday meal on both sides is the same — parboiled red rice, a thin coconut fish curry, a dry vegetable and a piece of fried fish. The difference appears at the festive end, where one kitchen produces khatkhate and the other sorpotel, and where the Catholic table adds bread, pork and a sweet course the Hindu table does not have. Almost nothing here is dry. Rice takes curry, and a Goan cook judges a curry by whether it coats.
Rice and curry, and the phrase Goans use for the meal itself rather than for a dish. Parboiled red rice with a thin coconut-and-chilli fish curry soured with kokum or tamarind, a fried mackerel or kingfish slice, and a dry vegetable. Eaten at midday, every day, in both communities.
Where to try: Any fish thali counter in Panaji, Margao or Mapusa at lunch.
The Saraswat fish curry — ground coconut, red chilli, coriander seed and a little turmeric, soured with kokum and finished with teppal, cooked only until the fish sets. It is deliberately thin, because it is designed to be poured over rice rather than eaten alone, and it is never made with vinegar.
A stew of eight or more vegetables and legumes cooked with coconut, tur dal and teppal, made for temple feasts, Ganesh Chaturthi and weddings. The rule is an odd number of vegetables and no onion or garlic, which is what marks it as temple food rather than household food.
Kokum extract with coconut milk, green chilli and garlic, drunk pink and cold at the end of a meal. It works as a digestive because the kokum is astringent and the coconut fat is not — a coastal answer to a heavy fried lunch, and shared with Malvan and Canara.
Dried prawn or dried mackerel crumbled, roasted and tossed raw with grated coconut, onion and chilli. It is the monsoon dish par excellence, because it is made entirely from what was preserved before the fishing ban began.
A thick coconut-and-spice gravy of dried peas, cashew or black-eyed beans. In the first weeks of the monsoon it is made with olmi — wild termite-mound mushrooms that fruit for a few days a year, cannot be cultivated and reach prices that make national news.
Pork cured in palm vinegar, garlic and dry red chilli with cinnamon, clove and cumin, then cooked down until the fat is glazed. The name is carne de vinha d'alhos — meat in wine and garlic — and there are no potatoes in it. It improves for two or three days, which was the original purpose.
Where to try: Christmas and wedding tables in Salcete; Mum's Kitchen and Martin's Corner serve it year-round.
Pork, liver and heart diced small, cooked in vinegar and a dark chilli masala and traditionally bound with the animal's blood. It is reheated once a day for several days before it is considered ready, which is both a flavour method and a preservation one in a kitchen without refrigeration.
Chicken or mutton in a masala of dry-roasted coconut, poppy seed, nutmeg, mace, star anise and a dozen more spices ground to a near-black paste. It is the one Goan curry where the roasting is dry and the colour comes from scorched coconut rather than chilli.
Chicken marinated in a green paste of coriander, green chilli, garlic, ginger, pepper and vinegar, then shallow-fried or grilled almost dry. The name and the method travelled with Portuguese soldiers and servants from Mozambique, which is why it is the only green masala in an otherwise red kitchen.
Prawns or small fish cooked into a thick vinegar-and-red-chilli paste and bottled. Related to the balichão shrimp pastes of Macau and Malacca and carried along the same Portuguese route, it keeps for months and is eaten a spoon at a time.
Sour and hot, and named for exactly that — shark, catfish or ray in a vinegar and Kashmiri-chilli gravy with no coconut at all. The absence of coconut is unusual here and is what makes it keep.
A whole mackerel slit along the spine, packed with a wet vinegar-chilli masala, dusted in rava and shallow fried. Recheado means stuffed; the masala is bottled in most Goan households and used through the year.
Steamed rice cakes leavened with toddy, spongy and faintly alcoholic, eaten with sorpotel by Catholics and with coconut curry by Saraswats. The same object in two kitchens, which makes it the clearest evidence that the split is religious rather than culinary.
Rice batter and a jaggery-coconut filling steamed inside a folded turmeric leaf, made in August for the Assumption and for the Hindu harvest observances in the same weeks. Two calendars, one leaf.
A layered pudding of coconut milk, egg yolk, sugar, flour and ghee, each layer grilled from above before the next is poured, traditionally seven to sixteen layers deep. It takes hours of attention and no shortcut has ever caught on, which is why it stayed a Christmas sweet rather than a daily one.
Where to try: Confeitaria 31 de Janeiro in Fontainhas, Panaji, and the Christmas season sweet stalls in Margao.
Staples
Sweets
Street food
Drinks
The food of Goa & Gomantak — signature dishes, staples, sweets, street food and where to eat them. (16)