My name is Genevieve D'Souza. I’ve been in this cooking, sweet making and cake making business for almost 22 years now. I make a lot of sweets during Christmas, I make a lot of Easter eggs during Easter season and our usual cooking, our daily cuisine.
Introduction
The East Indian cuisine is more about seafood and chicken and mutton is what we usually use. Even the vegetables, we have the main dishes like vindaloo, sorpatel, chicken moil, hand breads, chicken kuddi and mutton kuddi. In vegetables we have gabaar foogath, we have our East Indian pickle, our East Indian hand breads which are very, very, popular.
Bottle Masala
Our most important ingredient is the bottle masala which has 28-30 ingredients in it. We store it for the complete year and we make it every year. We bring it, clean it, dry it, take it to the mill and then we bring it home and store it in the bottles. That is how we preserve it for the entire year.
Festive Food
Mostly pork vindaloo, pork sorpotel, stuffed chicken, stuffed turkey, potato chops or you can have mutton chops. Then we have fugyas, wariyas, we have East Indian rotis. So these are the most important things we have for our festivals.
Vindaloo and Sorpatel
Vindaloo is a different part of the whole thing, that also is pork but that is grounded to a paste and made. So you make it a day prior, it tastes much better for the next day. The same goes for the sorpatel. Bottle masala is used in the sorpatel where all the ingredients are cut and made. That also you can use. You can store it for a very long time. These two dishes are stored for a very long time: vindaloo and sorpatel.
Local or Portuguese Influence?
Us, East Indians, follow our ancestral traditions and hold on to what our parents have been cooking. So we continue with the same tradition. The Portuguese will have different dishes, we will have our different dishes, nothing to combine them [there are no similarities between them].
The East Indian Wine
I make the wine at home as does everybody else. There are a lot of varieties of wines. People make rice wine, raisin wine, ginger wine, beetroot wine and so on. But I make the raisin wine with dry raisins. The whole process takes about 21 days. And that is how I get 7-8 bottles of wine. See here, the ingredients we use are being stored in a jar for 21 days. The more you mature the wine, the tastier and stronger it is. We have it for our functions, there is no function without wine. When we have our christening, we have to cheer, even for weddings, we have cake and wine. For any of our functions, we have cake and wine being served. So wine is one part of our East Indian tradition.
Cuisine Availability
Now they are making it available; some people are putting up small shops, some people are taking orders at home for East Indian cooking. There is no restaurant as such for East Indian food.
The East Indian Chicken Khuddi Curry
I will be showing you the East Indian chicken khuddi curry and I will show you the ingredients. The first thing is the bottle masala, the potatoes, the ground masala; we are going to roast this masala, the ghee, the oil, salt, chicken, coriander, curry leaves and tamarind pulp.
Now we start roasting the masala. We dry roast the onion and the green chillies first. Depends on how spicy you want it. I have put only two green chillies. These are two large onions for half a kilo of chicken curry. This is just for roasting after this has turned a little light brown. You can even add dried coconut or wet grated coconut also. That is an option, or you can add little of both, half and half.
Here I have used wet coconut, grated wet coconut. So I’m roasting the grated wet coconut, the onions and the green chillies. When we are roasting we don’t have to roast the garlic, ginger and pudina (mint). We don’t have to roast it; this goes while grinding. So these ingredients go for grinding.
After grinding, we get this pulp. This is the bottle masala with 30 ingredients which we have brought, cleaned, dried, taken to the mill, powdered it and bottled it. This is what we use for the whole year. You can store for a year or over a year too. So this bottle masala I will be using for the chicken khuddi curry.
Take some oil, a large helping of oil; ghee, one tablespoon of ghee. Earlier they did not use curry leaves, but I use curry leaves as it gives a different type of a good aroma. I use curry leaves when I fry my bottle masala. I will be using a good helping of bottle masala, one big spoon of the bottle masala, a very good helping. Fry the masala well. Then we use the ground masala and fry well till the oil floats. You have to fry this masala very well. Once the masala is fried, we put the chicken scoops in this and fry them well with the masala.
The chicken and the potato are almost cooked, now we add in the tamarind pulp. We give it a good stir and a good boil and at the end, we add in our coriander. You garnish it with coriander and our dish is ready.
