Nandita Haksar <nhak...@gmail.com> has just got published her new food memoirs called 'Flavours of Nationalism: Recipes for love, hate and friendship'. The last chapter of the book is about Goa. Goanet reproduces an excerpt with permission of the publishers Speaking Tiger Books. See http://bit.ly/NanditaFood
Excerpt from Page 203-211. ---------------------------------------- Goa's cuisine does not consist only of fish curry and rice. While Goan Catholics love their fish curry and rice, they also have their chorizo or sausages, and bread. The Goan sausage is small and when dried looks like red beads strung in rows. It is mixed with spices and bursting with flavour. I read a story in the local newspaper about Antonia Da Silva, a sausage maker who has been selling sausages all his life, like his father and grandfather. Every day he chops 90 kilos of meat, seasons it with salt and garlic, marinates it with 10 litres of his own homemade palm vinegar and adds the other spices to make five thousand sausages a day. In addition, he sends four thousand sausages three times a month to Mumbai and fifteen hundred to Swindon in the UK, where there are a substantial number of Goans. And this is the story of just one sausage maker! I wonder how many sausages are made every day in Goa? There are many things you can do with the sausage. The most common is sausage in pao or pav, the local bread. The Goans also make scrambled eggs mixed with sausage, and a sausage pulao which is absolutely delicious. Sebastian and I have found that adding even one or two beads to vegetables such as brinjals, ladies' fingers or just the good old potato can give the dish a delicious flavour. Sebastian even makes sausage-stuffed paratha. It is such a wonderful example of fusion food. In a sense, Goan cuisine, like so many others, is a testimony to the wonders of fusion cuisine. Perhaps the best example is the feijoada, a stew made by cooking rajma beans with pork and beef along with spices. I was surprised when I saw it in Brazil, where it is considered the national dish. Some people say that the dish was invented by slaves from Angola who worked in the plantations in Brazil. They made the dish from the leftovers that they got from the dining tables of their masters. Feijoada is also commonly prepared in Portugal, Macau, Angola, Cape Verde and Mozambique. ***** The first time I became aware of Goa's strong connection to Africa was when we used to buy our sausages from Aggassim, the village famous for making them. A man who looked African could be seen stuffing the red mixture of sausage meat, spices and vinegar into the intestines. We learnt that he was from the Siddi community: people who had been brought to Goa as slaves by the Portuguese. We would be reminded of Goa's connection with Africa from time to time. For instance, when we first tasted chicken cafreal, we were told that it was a spicier version of the dish from Mozambique. It was introduced into Goan cuisine by the Portuguese and the African soldiers serving under them. The preparation involves green chillies, fresh coriander leaves, onion, garlic, ginger, cinnamon, pepper, chilli, mace, clove powder and lime juice or vinegar. There was a flourishing market for African slaves in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Goa was one of the most important ports connecting Mozambique, Mauritius, Macau and Ceylon, as it was then. The human cargo was handled by Goan traders such as the Mhamai Kamat brothers. The 350-year-old Mhamai Kamat house near the old Secretariat is a major landmark in Panaji. The Mhamai Kamats consist of ten families, which are dispersed but congregate here for the Ganesh Chaturthi festival. The house is thrown open every year around the time of this festival and more than a thousand guests are given a traditional feast, containing sixteen vegetables. ***** Sebastian and I had settled down to our life in Chorao. I was always surprised at how we had been welcomed and made to feel at home, even though he was from Manipur and me from Delhi. On one occasion, when Sebastian and I were flying from Mumbai to Bangkok by Air India, one of the flight attendants turned out to be from Goa. When he learnt we were living in Chorao he had a special request: he was retiring and could I persuade his wife to live in Chorao? He said his wife was also on the aircraft; they were going on a holiday. Of late , they had been having differences of opinion on where they should settle after his retirement. He wanted to settle in his ancestral home in Chorao, but his wife was not convinced. He brought his wife and seated her next to me. The wife grumbled and said her husband did not realize how difficult it was to maintain old houses; she complained that he did not understand the practical aspects of living in an ancestral home. I had to agree with her because we ourselves had decided not to buy an old home--they were damp and could attract termites which would be dangerous for my books. While we were conversing, the flight attendant told us that there were two other flight attendants on the plane who were also from Goa; and unbelievably all were from Chorao! So there were six of us from Chorao meeting at 36,000 feet in the air. When we landed, the flight attendant presented us with an expensive bottle of champagne to celebrate. We decided it would be appropriate to share the bottle with our friends back in Goa. So we called them and Sebastian popped open the cork and poured the sparkling wine into glasses that we clinked together, as we had seen people do in movies. But all of us were so very disappointed by the slightly sour taste and could not finish our drinks! We were surprised that none of our friends had liked the champagne, but then we had also fallen victim to believing in the stereotypical image of Goans. Except for the elite, the normal Goan may like his or her glass of wine but the wine-drinking custom is not integral to Goan culture. What the average Goan loves his feni, not foreign wines. However, the wine industry is trying to thrust an alien culture upon the Goans in order to promote their products. It is not just wine that is being thrust upon Goans but an entire culture which is unfamiliar to them. According to Arthemio D'Silva, who oversees sales of wines in Goa from the stable of the United Breweries, Goans still have a long way to go before they truly appreciate wine. In an interview to Goa Streets in January 2013, he said: "It's my personal opinion from the many wine events, parties and celebrations I've been to all these years that many people drink wine as some sort of status symbol without really appreciating its taste." ***** We have been witness to the way transnational corporations have been working to reach deep into every home in every village in Goa. Coca Cola and Pepsi have been busy too. On the ferry going back to Chorao, we would often encounter a young man. We used to give him a lift and he told us that he was excited because he had got a contract to sell Coca-Cola. The company would provide him with the machine to store the cold drinks. I am sure the man had no idea that a regular 355 ml can of Coke or Pepsi contains about ten teaspoons of sugar, which is like drinking a glass of the syrup of gulab jamuns. The man just wanted a job; he was not concerned with the struggles all over the world to limit the power of the soda giants. These struggles have been documented by Marion Nestle in her book Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (and Winning). The struggles in other parts of India against these soda giants for consuming vast quantities of water had not made much way. ***** In 1977, the government had banned Coca-Cola. Many of us were happy because we hoped our local drinks, such as coconut water, sherbets and juices, would be saved. But seventeen years later, Coca-Cola was back--and with a bang. On 24 October 1993, it was reported that Coca-Cola made its official return to India in the shadow of the Taj Mahal. A colourful cavalcade of Coca-Cola trucks, vans and uniformed deliverymen paraded through the streets of Agra to great fanfare, signalling to the world's second-most populated country that Coke was back in a big way. While our friend was excited about getting the Coca-Cola machine, 175 local bottlers in Goa had united under the banner of Goa Small-Scale Bottlers Association and were demanding that the government scrap the mega Coca-Cola project coming up at the Verna Industrial Estate, with all the privileges including a twelve-year sales-tax exemption. Goa's unorganized soft drink industry still holds over 65 per cent market share by selling around six million crates annually, but the local bottlers feared that their market would be wiped away. ***** While the products of these transnational corporations were successfully making their way into the daily lives of unsuspecting Goans, their traditional sources of food were under attack. One such traditional source of protein is the frog. During the monsoons in Goa the village boys look forward to catching frogs for dinner. Frogs' legs have been eaten for decades in Goa and even today you can get a plate of frogs' legs along with feni if the barman trusts you not to report him to the police. In Goa, frog legs are called 'Jumping Chicken'. Sebastian and I were reminded of the nights back in Imphal when the boys would go with their flashlights and buckets to catch the big fat frogs. Goa has banned the catching of frogs, and every year before the monsoons there are warnings from the Forest Department that anyone caught in the act would be arrested. There is a big difference between local people eating frogs and big corporations involved in the import and export of frogs' legs. Just as there is a difference between commercialized whale hunting by whaling companies and indigenous people hunting whales for their own consumption. The scale is totally different. But the stories that appear in the newspapers blame the Goans for the depletion of this amphibian in the state. I interviewed a farmer in Chorao, Jagan Nath Pai, and asked him what he thought was the cause of the disappearance of frogs. Pai was sixty-five years old and he had worked on his land ever since he was a young man. He had converted his paddy field into a mango orchard and we stood under the shade of a mango tree and discussed the problem. The farmer said in addition to his land he had five buffaloes and so he was totally self-sufficient for his food needs except for buying tea and sugar. Jagan Nath is different from other farmers because he is a committed natural farmer. He was converted to the idea after reading One Straw Revolution by Japanese author Masanobu Fukuoka (1913-2008). He has not used chemical pesticides since 1993. Pai says the frogs have disappeared because of the pesticides being used by farmers. The insecticides and pesticides have killed all the insects and so the frogs have no food to eat. Also, many frogs are killed by vehicular traffic because when people come rushing home they don't bother to notice a frog on the road. I ask whether his children were also interested in carrying on organic farming. He said his son was a lawyer and, like today's youth, cared nothing for traditions. He would not stand for a pregnant woman in a bus and would tell her to go by taxi. I felt embarrassed because I had touched a raw nerve. I could see that the sustainable lifestyle of Jagan Nath Pai would have little appeal to people living in a consumer society. ***** More details of the book at: http://bit.ly/NanditaFood Send your feedback to goa...@goanet.org with a cc to nhak...@gmail.com