Foodprint in Lisbon: Colonial Cousins

From the ubiquitous vindaloo to the not-so-well-chronicled scrumptiousness of bolinho de peixe, Goan cuisine abounds in Lisbon and thus finds a firm footing for itself as Portugal’s most loved colonial ‘return gift’

By Raul Dias

The moment seems way too epiphanic to be real as I sit at the tiny, rough-hewn wooden table that’s covered with rice sack cloth with a bowl of steaming caril de peixe plonked atop it. Next to it, jostling for space is a small salver bearing a two-by-three matrix of small, freshly-baked paos, whose concave tops glisten in the light of the wall sconces, that also highlight a colourful mural of Lord Ganesha. I’ve just had my first morsel, mopping up the marigold orange-hued curry—laden with the tender, almost quivering white flesh of the pampo (pomfret) fish—with a scoop fashioned out of the bread that gives us Goans our de facto moniker—paowalla!
Suddenly, an apparition in white enters my peripheral vision. Jesus is standing beside the table, arms akimbo. “How’s it going?”, he asks with a beatific smile. “It’s just like mum’s fish curry back home,” I hear my filial reflexes taking over, as I go in for a second bite. And then it happens. For the second time in my life, I feel tears well up in my eyes while eating (or at the very least, attempting to eat!) a meal. The first time was at a nondescript hole-in-the-wall in Sydney’s Chinatown called BBQ King, where I literally sobbed while tucking into a plastic tub of sublime char siu pork, roast goose and sesame oil-spritzed, blanched gai lan that was hitherto the best meal of my life. But that sunny June afternoon, Jesus Lee, the Goa-born chef and owner of Lisbon’s Jesus é Goês (Rua São José 23, 1150-352 Lisbon)—which is perhaps, in my opinion, the best Goan restaurant this side of the Zuari—had had me for a goner.
But then, with Goan food currying (do excuse the pun) fond favour with Lisbon’s food cognoscenti over the last couple of years, Jesus has little option but to stay true to the culinary antecedents of this very complex chimera of a cuisine that places the triumvirate of spicy, tangy, pork-y dishes on its highest altar, something he learned by observing his mother Paulina cook back home in Goa. So, while his stash of malt vinegar is flown in every other month from Goa, his annual trips back home to India help replenish his spice stockpile—something he uses deftly in everything from a far-from-ersatz take on shark ambot-tik to a transcendent camarão (prawn) reichado.
“There’s absolutely no room for faking Goan food. They’ll be caught out in a second. By now, we all know our xacuti from our xec xec,” laughs my friend, fellow food writer and proud Lisbonite, Xavier Colaco, who sees the burgeoning number of Goan restaurants in Lisbon as a great way to pay homage to both Portuguese and Indian cuisines, the fruit of whose coupling is Goan food. “But this has not always been the case. Though we’ve had Goan restaurants ever since the 1961 liberation of Goa from Portugal—that saw nostalgic Portuguese returnees from Goa yearn for a taste of their ‘other home’—the hip quotient of ‘going for Goan’ is a recent phenomenon, brought on by the younger crowd.” 

Lisbon-based Goan food historian Anna Philomena Dias é Lobo, whom I meet up with for high tea at Lisbon’s Time Out Market spends half her year in Goa, trawling though ancient recipe books and manuscripts of crusty old Goan matriarchs in order to distill the very essence of the cuisine that she feels is influenced by a number of Portugal’s other colonies. “Take for instance these pastéis de bacalhau,” Anna says, pointing to the three differently spiced zeppelin-like fried orbs of flaked dried cod fish that is reconstituted with milk and then mashed with boiled potatoes—a play on the typically Portuguese-Goan bolinho de peixe or fish croquettes that eschews bacalhau in favour of local Indian fish like ghol or ravas. “While one is made with fresh coriander—a throwback to Goa, the other has in it piri-piri chillies from Mozambique and the third gets its reddish tint from Brazilian annatto seeds! Speaking of Mozambique, did you know that the famous Goan chicken cafreal owes its genesis to the west African nation?” she says of the fiery hot, dry greenish-blackish roast chicken, that she lets me know was prepared by Mozambican slaves who were brought to Goa by the Portuguese colonists to work in the palm groves and who were called ‘cafirs’—from where the dish actually gets its name.
Dinner at the Resturante Cantinho da Paz (Rua da Paz, 4, São Bento, Lisbon) in Lisbon’s historic quarter of São Bento teaches me a lesson to never judge a restaurant by its shabby doorway. A rather loquacious server had me know that the restaurant is owned by a man of Goan origin who came to Portugal in 1964 and worked his way up from plongeur to owner eventually. This casual dining Goan restaurant serves modestly-priced, home-style comfort food like chouriço de Goa (spicy Goa sausages), pork sorpotel and an absolutely divine, if a tad commonplace beef vindaloo that one can find these days on restaurant menus around the world from Vienna to Vladivostok!
But this ubiquity should in no way take away from this highly complex dish that has gone back and forth a fair bit from Portugal to Goa and now back to Portugal, before it eventually evolved into what the Portuguese know and love as vindaloo today. Apparently, it was seafaring Portuguese explorers who carried with them on their voyages a simple dish of pork marinated with wine and garlic called the carne de vinha d’alhos, with the red wine helping to preserve the meat and with the pungency of the garlic masking odours, if any. They would then stew this over low heat and eat it with dried loaves of chewy bread.
But with the conquest of Goa coming into the picture, this well-travelling dish underwent a sea change with palm vinegar standing in for the wine and with more spices like Kashmiri chillies and toasted cumin seeds adding to the fray. The Portuguese version today, is, to use an oft-flogged Thai idiom “same-same, but different’, in that, it is a lot less spicy and a wee bit less vinegar-y than its Goan Sibling. 
But, as I was to soon discover on an emergency grocery supplies run to Lisbon’s Lapa neighbourhood branch of Pingo Doce—Portugal’s largest supermarket chain, Goan delicacies have even found a firm footing for themselves in the country’s mass produced, FMCG sector. So, while I noshed on an impulse purchase of a two-pack of the spicy-prawn-in-white-sauce-enrobed-in-breaded-pastry risole de camarão, that were exact doppelgängers of the ones we Goans eat as hors d’oeuvres at ‘house parties’, the also-spotted-and-gourmandized right away seven-layered bebinca though less sweet, was almost the real deal!   
The ‘real deal’ being a calorific, egg yolk-butter-sugar-coconut milk-redolent diet-buster, that we have a group of canny 16^th century Franciscan nuns in Goa to thank, or so my grand aunt Tia Antoinette would have me know. With no apparent need for the leftover yolks once the egg whites were used to stiffen their wimples, the resourceful Mother Abbess conjured up this recipe that the nuns then baked with seven successive layers representing the seven hillocks that they had to ascend and descend every day in order to reach the church from their hilltop convent in Old Goa.
Imbued with legends and stories, the veracity of which are at best a moot point, the mélange of the Portuguese-Goan cuisines has resulted in something so tangible and real, that it exists not just in the yellowed, dog-eared pages of old recipe books, but celebrated as a living, edible bite of history that’s so very hard to resist, be it in Loutolim or far Lisbon. I’m sure Jesus would agree!    

The Brazilian Feijoada Trail in Lisbon…
Just like cafreal, another edible colonial vestige with deep-rooted slave underpinnings is the hearty Brazilian black bean, chouriço and pork off cut stew called feijoada. Served with a posse of accompaniments like boiled white rice, deep-fried collard greens and a dry farofa sprinkling made from toasted cassava flour sautéed in a bacon-onion mirepoix, and jazzed up with orange wedges for an acidic hit, this antipodean iteration in Lisbon, is more often than not preferred over the indigenous Portuguese version that is plated up sans the collard greens and farofa, and with red kidney beans standing in for the feijao negra or black beans that lend the dish its rather onomatopoeic name. 

Here’s a pick of three of the best places in Lisbon to sample this notorious Brazilian siesta-inducer!

* Babete Gastrobar
Channeling typical Brazilian ‘botecos’—that are informal neighbourhood restaurants dishing out hearty, simple fare—this bright and cheery four-year-old eatery in the Calçada do Duque area brings the infectious Rio Carnival vibe straight to your table with its pulsating samba piped music and steaming hot plates of feijoada with all the trimmings! (tel. +351-21-1513339)

* Páteo Restaurante
Located on a leafy street along the tony Avenida Joao, this rather modern-looking restaurant belies the rustic Portuguese and Brazilian fare served within, that has earned it a legion of fans, who think nothing of queuing up for hours on end—all for a pool-sized bowl of its sublime, five-hours simmered Brazilian-style feijoada. So, line up and drool… (www.pateorestaurante.pt; tel. +351-21-8687208)

* Comida De Santo
As one of the oldest Brazilian restaurants in Lisbon, this Príncipe Real neighbourhood icon has woven itself a permanent place in the Brazilian food tapestry of the Portuguese capital. For those with a yen for the two lynchpins of Brazilian cuisine i.e. feijoada and caipirinhas, this is the go-to place that pays special homage to the food of northeastern Brazil, which paradoxically, is itself a confluence of Portuguese and African styles of cooking. (www.comidadesanto.pt; tel. +351-21-3963339)

(A shorter, edited version of this article appeared in the 20th May 2017 issue of the Mint Lounge newspaper, India http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/8msOyB4lu3IFHgDAkXbJCK/A-Goa-state-of-mind-in-Lisbon.html)