Reggie's Father's Vindaloo

We were eating pork Vindaloo which was going down nicely with some crisp cold white Chilean wine on the side. The Vindaloo was from Reggie’s father who has a long reputation for producing the best Vindaloo in the community. We ask Reggie for the recipe but he says it’s a secret his father will not reveal.

Reggie’s father is retired and lives with his wife in a rambling old house. Every Sunday he serves a late lunch that never fails to bring the family together. Familiar tastes and aromas from the past keep the family bonded, unfasten old memories and stir new ones for the future - the lunches are a never-ending legacy from the old man.

Reggie’s siblings who are all grown up and have families of their own lament that they are never able to reproduce any of their father's better dishes; their version, they say, is only a vague approximation of what their father conjures up in his kitchen. They complain they are diligent students of their father’ culinary lessons but that he is a partial teacher who holds back some one ingredient or method that gives his cooking it's supreme quality. Their father chuckles at the allegation.

’The secret ingredient is the love I put into my cooking - the love I have for all of you. I would say that that’s what’s missing in your cooking. Don't think of the ingredients. Think of how to delight those who would eat what you cook.’

The children know there are things more tangible that go into his cooking than love that he will not tell - dry herbs that he rubs into the bubbling pot when no one is looking; a concoction of spices in a salt shaker that is only seen rarely which they suspect he keeps in his pocket all the time, like his wallet; liquid he drips into salads which he says is oil but they know is not all oil and that sleight of hand that accompanies the tempering of his curries just when the pot is about to be taken off the fire.

Every time they tease him with what they know of his concealments, his answer is always the same.
’Your suspicions distract you. They are excuses for your sloppiness. There are no secrets. Don't think of the ingredients. As you cook, think of the food as you want it to taste; think of how it will delight those who will eat it and you will get it right.’

The Vindaloo is an enigma. Many nations and peoples from Muscat to Malacca claim it as their own but it belongs to none. The dish is a bastard amalgam of meat and spices with no fixed abode, concocted by captive hosts on the command of their marauding captors. The palate is Portuguese, the taste for rotting, salted pork all of the Mediterranean, and the spicy pungent sauce in which the dish is cooked is Asia’s vengeance for its wounded history. The Vindaloo will recede with the invader’s galleons into his home in his own country where it will destroy his guts and blur his brain for centuries forth.

‘To cook a Vindaloo, you must think the Vindaloo.’ This is Reggie’s father’s lesson. ’This is food born of violence’, he will say. ‘These flavors are those of the assailant so that when cooking the Vindaloo, you must think of how he will relish it’.

The Vindaloo does not fit the typologies of Asian cooking. Salted pork, which is the principle ingredient of the Vindaloo is hardly known in the coastal towns where the dish took root. Food lore has it that it came with the Portuguese who were the first European visitors to go round the Cape with violent intentions. Pork preserved in salt in barrels kept their sailors’ bellies full for the long journey. It was the salted meat of the pig that was culinarily transformed with spices from Asia to become the Vindaloo.

Some describe it as an innovation of the Indians who were converted to Christianity, or of the Portuguese left behind in ports like Goa and Malacca, but whichever way you look at its origins, the Vindaloo lies outside the culinary pale of any of the cultures that were doomed for collision at the dawn of the 16th Century. It was the collision that created the dish.

The Vindaloo's distinct hot, sour, mustardy taste derives from its three primary ingredients - chilli, vinegar and mustard. The last two are not traditional ingredients of Indian cooking and as such must have been derived from the Europeans. Mustard seeds and mustard oil are commonly used in Indian cooking but it is not often that you would see a recipe that requires the use of mustard paste as is needed in the Vindaloo. The authentic Vindaloo requires a paste to be made of mustard seeds, pepper and vinegar. You will not go wrong if the paste you produced was of the consistency of whole grain mustard of the type you would purchase in a jar from a supermarket.

The mustard paste is mixed with turmeric and hot chilli paste to marinate the diced salted pork. Two hours of marination will suffice if the pork is salted but with meat that is fresh, a full day in the fridge is preferred. Whatever the meat, there must be some fat in it to give the Vindaloo its grease.

Onions, garlic and a good amount of ginger is massaged into the meat before it is cooked in an covered earthen pot over a very slow fire for two hours. If the fire is too hot, the meat will dry and stick to the pot. Stirring will help, but the slow cooking is the trick. After two hours, open the cover to let some of the juices to dry. What you must see is the meat in a thick red-yellow creamy sauce glistening with the melted fat. The meat may be cooked to almost a mash or left unbroken. Curry leaves are not part of traditional recipe but if you like their flavour there is no reason why they should not be added. Try also a variation to the traditional ingredients by adding a couple of leaves from a lemon or lime tree to the meat while it is being cooked.

One final point - although pork is the meat most associated with Vindaloo, you could try chicken or other white meats, such as that of monitor lizard or crocodile.

The secret ingredient, if you must know, is fenugreek seeds, small dried bird’s-eye chillies, peppercorn, rock salt and a spoonful of coriander seeds, all roasted and ground to a fine powder. Store in a salt shaker and sprinkle generously on the finished product when no one is watching.

October 2011.