A standard Goan dish sparks an issue and imparts a historical past lesson
On a latest go to to Goa, Bunny discovered herself embroiled in an issue a couple of recipe.
The recipe in query was for Chicken Cafreal, a conventional Goan dish that traces its roots to Mozambique which was a Portuguese colony. African troopers who served within the Portuguese military are stated to have launched the dish to Portugal. Cafreal interprets as ‘in the manner of Cafres, inhabitants of a region of Southern Africa’.
As frequent guests to Goa, which we fell in love with method again in 1978 after we first went there, we assiduously keep away from institutions calling themselves ‘Dilli Durbar’ and ‘Pure Veg Bombay Thali’ in favour of Goan fare. We are acquainted with Xacuti, and Rawa Fry, and Butter-Garlic, and have engaged in theological debates concerning the relative deserves of the poi vis-à-vis the unde and the fermented-rice based mostly subtly candy sana.
However, we bypass Cafreal, after having tried it as soon as in an eatery famed for it. It arrived at our desk as an inviting dark-green coriander preparation, however the seductive inexperienced turned out to be a lethal camouflage for the fiery wrath of inexperienced chillies which assaulted our palates. Cafreal? Never once more!
We occurred to say this to Chef Peter, who runs one in all our favorite eating places in Goa. With a dismissive gesture he stated that what we had eaten was an impostor, and he promised to arrange the real merchandise for us.
Peter’s Cafreal got here with a reddish-brown sauce, with no signal of inexperienced or of coriander. And – blessed reduction! – no trace of taste-bud-annihilating chillies. Peter, who’d learnt the recipe from Chef Gines Viegas, who launched the dish to Goa, defined that using the inexperienced coriander-chilli paste to make Cafreal was a concession to the North Indian vacationer.
As he recounted the story of Cafreal, he evoked an odyssey involving the ebb and movement of the tides of historical past, of Africa, and Portugal, and Goa, and the cross-cultural currents that make up that almost all complicated recipe of all, involving many lands and lots of ages. The recipe that goes into the making of what we name us.
Disclaimer
This article is meant to carry a smile to your face. Any connection to occasions and characters in actual life is coincidental.
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