>From Goan Voice UK Daily Newsletter 19 Aug. 2012 at www.goanvoice.org.uk
By Roland Francis. It is rumored that once upon a time God in his glory wished to thank the Goan people for their hospitality toward their fellow men, their fervent prayers to Him and the good care they took of their ecology and habitat, wasting nothing. The result was the gift of the art of cooking. It was a unisex gift. Both genders excelled in it and everyone partaking in their results, enjoyed it. There were days when the older women in the household would spend hours upon hours of painstaking care preparing food from the raw ingredients and the results were superlative. While the family might not have appreciated the culinary efforts and the time expended then, many years later spread throughout the Diaspora, they often recall a tangy sorpotel, a made from rooster xacuti or a catfish ambott-tik the likes of which they know they will never taste again, not because the art has died, but because nobody has the time or the will to do it the old-fashioned way. Every family matriarch had a specialty they excelled in, whether food or pastries. My mum could make a prawn chilly fry which even in its simplicity my wife could never come close to, or the most delectable cutlets made of yesterday's leftover meat dishes or mouth-watering letri a sweet dish one hardly sees today. Toronto on a Goan restaurant and eating out level, disappoints. Sporadic attempts were made to open Goan restaurants but they either eventually closed down. Fortunately, the art remains with many individual households that supply food on order. While differing wildly in taste, they all preserve the essential Goan goodness for very reasonable prices. You can get perennial favorites like large and well stuffed potato chops for 15 a dozen, a pound of sausages for 12, a tub of sorpotel for 8, a dozen prawn rissois for 9. These home based caterers prefer not to offer a fish menu, as fresh and tasty salmon, pickerel, trout and bass are all lake and fresh water catch and not familiar to Goan cooking, although a few ladies are able to make choice salmon pickles and parra. We in Toronto are not as lucky as the Goans in the UK and elsewhere since Indian food has not yet gone mainstream. Indian cooking has just been catching on in the last few years with the non Asian population. As yet even the better class of Indian restaurants, except for one or two in Mississauga, have not been able to maintain high standards in the menu, décor, wine list or in service. I am told that real money can only be poured in such endeavors when the taste goes into critical mass as has happened in London. After that it is only a matter of time for Goan eating places to ride on the coat-tails of success of these Indian restaurants as Goan cuisine has already become known to the vast Punjabi population of the Toronto area with their relatives in India talking about it. I suspect that the first fine Goan restaurant in Toronto will be run either by a Punjabi or a Parsi, the latter community few but well known. Goans cooks have made a mark over the years in Bombay, in 5 star hotels in the Middle East and on board cruise lines, but few of them have engaged professionally in Toronto. Here it is the Sri Lankans who have infiltrated the kitchens and slowly climbed from slicers and dicers to sous-chefs to head chefs, many in the 'cordon bleu' category. Their refugee path has taken them from Jaffna to Bonn and Berne where they have usefully spent their time practicing the art learned from famous European chefs in their small but niche establishments. No Goan cooking story would be replete without a reference to the famous Mascarenhas of Anjuna and the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay which was every management apprentice cook's nightmare. Asked to share his recipes and quantities with his assistants, he would say, "a pinch of this a fistful of that and a dash of the other " not to deny passing on of his skills to his eager learners but just like the way he really did it. He was an old master in the new world, just the old-fashioned way for him. By Roland Francis, Toronto (roland.fran...@gmail.com )