Samar Halarnkar: A threadfin stew, and the idea of home
Travel affects food, and much of Goan food wouldn’t be what it is today if flavours had not travelled to distant lands. The Portuguese-influenced caldeirada, a seafood stew underwent a metamorphosis when it journeyed east to the Estado da India after the conquest
Cynics would say I am rootless. I’d say I am rooted in many places.
I’ve lived in Bengaluru for 26 years, Delhi for 17. Bengaluru is the place I consider home, I speak Kannada passably, and I am deeply attached to the people and the city. Yet, I can’t say I truly belong. I never really took to Delhi and its culture, although I speak Hindi decently. Mumbai is always exciting and feels like home for about a week, after which I’d rather go home. My Marathi is good enough to fool the locals for a while, and I like hearing my mother’s tales of her life there—it gives me some feeling of closeness.
To make things more complicated, I feel a strong affinity for the place where my father came from, even though I have only a rudimentary command of Konkani. I love the music, I follow reels of musically inclined Goans—from choirs to school students to old women singing while they clean fish—and, yes, I can sing most of Lorna’s Bebdo. If you don’t know who and what that is, please Google and know your country better.
Whatever my dilemmas about belonging, one thing all these places associated with my life and memories have in common is that they struggle with “development". I'm most bothered by Goa. I have a sense of dark foreboding when I see how the state’s lush commons—the hills, the fields and the forests—are being sold to the highest bidder. It’s depressing, and I admire the pockets of resistance that have sprung up everywhere, as citizens try to hold the line against rapacious mafias and politicians.
I tend to drown my sorrows in food, and it is here that Goa shines, miles ahead of my other places of belonging. You can, of course, call me biased, but it is food from my family’s heritage that I return to time and again—when I am sad, when I am joyful, and when I want to make people happy.
I often say that, unlike most Indians, I never carry condiments or food from home when I travel abroad, even in the years I have lived on the other side of the world. There are always so many more flavours to discover. Yet, my attachment to the food of my ancestors is so strong that I have rarely left Indian shores without kokum, that little, black rind that flavours almost all the fish curries I have ever made.
I was thinking last week of how travel affects food, and I recalled that much of Goan food wouldn’t be what it is today if flavours had not travelled in, as much as I travel out with them. So, I honoured Goa’s fused culinary heritage and made a fish curry without kokum.
I remembered a Portuguese-influenced stew that one rarely sees in Goa these days, the caldeirada. It underwent a metamorphosis when it journeyed east to the Estado da India after the conquest. The thin, watery stew gained coconut milk and the spices of the Konkan crept in. There are many versions of the caldeirada, depending on who makes it and, I suppose, the mood they are in, and what is available around them. That’s the beauty of any stew really.
I usually take the easy way out and grind the coconut with water, thinning it out in the pan to form a curry. This time, I did it the hard way, grinding the coconut with spices and squeezing the milk out of it. The rawas or the Indian salmon (the fourfinger threadfin, to use its formal name), which I used, is a delicate fish, so be careful not to stir or probe the curry.
Some of the recipe I kept intact from the Portuguese original, such as sliced onions and tomatoes; the Iberian way also includes potatoes, capsicum and other vegetables. I Indianised it further by including curry leaves and green chillies, despite which—and the red chillies in the ground coconut—it is a mild curry.
So, you see, there are distinct advantages to being free of rootedness. I could not be happier about it.
RAWAS CALDEIRADA
Serves 6
Ingredients
1 kg rawas fillets
1 tsp turmeric
2 tsp red-chilli or Kashmiri mirch powder
200g grated coconut
1 tbsp coriander seeds
2 tsp cumin seeds
6 dried red chillies
14 garlic cloves
Half-inch ginger
1 large onion, finely sliced
1 large tomato, finely sliced
12 curry leaves
2 green chillies, top and bottom lopped off
Juice of half lemon (or two limes)
Two-and-a-half cups warm water
4 tsp oil
Salt to taste
Method
Marinate the fish in turmeric, red chilli powder, 1 tsp oil and some salt and set aside for an hour.
Grind the grated coconut with 2 cups of warm water, cumin, coriander seeds, 8 cloves of garlic, ginger, some salt and dried red chillies to a paste.
Strain the coconut milk from the ground coconut, adding the remaining half cup of water if needed. Do this twice to extract all possible coconut milk. Set aside.
Crush and mince the remaining 6 cloves of garlic. Warm 3 tsp oil in a large pan on medium heat. Add the curry leaves, green chillies and garlic, and cook until the leaves start to splutter. Add the onion and saute until it begins to soften. Add tomato and saute for a minute. Add the coconut milk, reduce the heat until it begins to become creamy.
Add water if you need to thin it out further. Add the lemon juice. Slip in the marinated fish and cook till done, swirling the pan occasionally so the fish cooks evenly.
Check salt. Serve hot with rice, sannas or appams.
Our Daily Bread is a column on easy, inventive cooking. Samar Halarnkar is the author of The Married Man’s Guide to Creative Cooking—And Other Dubious Adventures. He posts @samar11 on X
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