Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Every white male chef who writes for Vittles is granted one pass per year by Jonathan and Sharanya to write an Indian recipe. Today, Nick is cashing in his to share a recipe for a pork cheek vindalhao, inspired by a trip to Goa.
We are down to our last hundred or so copies of Issue 1 — to buy it, please visit our website.
Nick Bramham’s Pork Cheek Vindalho
My wife and I arrive at Horseshoe Bar & Restaurant in Panaji, the Goan capital, feeling hungry and flustered but also optimistic. It’s early in the evening, and the inferno heat of the day is beginning to subside. I’ve been desperately trying to track down sorpotel on this trip – a Luso–Goan dish of pork offal cooked in a sweet and sour vinegar-spiked sauce thickened with blood – and have it on good authority that I’ll find it here, where renowned chef-proprietor Vasco Silveira has been cooking traditional Goan Portuguese dishes for almost forty-five years.
Much to my surprise, it’s the man himself who greets us at the door, with a disarming mix of bafflement and joy – the restaurant is empty, and remains so during our time there. He settles us at a spacious window table and presents us with extremely welcome glasses of cold water. The extensive menu is a greatest hits of Luso–Goan dishes, but as we’re trying to whittle down the options from this embarrassment of riches, he informs us that many of the dishes are unavailable. My heart sinks. ‘No sorpotel?’ ‘No sorpotel.’
He suggests that we have the clams, masala fish and pork vindalho. We smile and nod in agreement – when a chef tells you what you should order, you do as you’re told. He shuffles off, and returns some twenty minutes later with our food, which is accompanied by a vivid green salad and a plate of warm Portuguese rolls with little packets of Amul butter. The clams are very much in the European style, simply steamed with white wine and coriander, while the fish is a lightly fried fillet of pomfret brushed with a rich paste of red chilli, turmeric and lemon.
It’s the pork vindalho where things get really interesting. Pleasingly slapdash chunks of meat bob in a gravy of vibrant cherry red. It’s hot, though not unbearably so – more piquant or sharp, with a little sweetness. The spicing is complex. All of sudden, I’m sitting up straighter, trying to remember the history of this dish and where this particular version sits within it.
Silveira’s vindalho bears little resemblance to what most people in the UK would recognise as a vindaloo, mostly known these days as the hottest dish at curry houses, the one ordered by lads one-upping one another as an act of bravado somewhere in between necking several pints and committing a hate crime. But these very different dishes share a common history
Vindalho/vindaloo has its origins in carne de vinha d’alhos, a traditional Portuguese dish of meat marinated and cooked with vinegar and garlic brought to Goa by colonisers in the sixteenth century. With time, the dish evolved, with Goan cooks adding local spices (such as black pepper, cloves, cumin, turmeric and cinnamon), the sweet and sour tang of jaggery and tamarind, and red chilli (another product of Portuguese Empire introduced to the Subcontinent). The dish became popular with the British during the East India Company’s brief occupation of Goa at the turn of the nineteenth century, and from there it gradually became part of the Anglo-Indian culinary canon. Initially served in the colonial clubs of Victorian London to decrepit old officials pining for the Raj, the dish appeared on the menu at Veeraswamy (London’s oldest surviving Indian restaurant) when it opened in 1926, and then spread to the menus of Indian restaurants and takeaways that opened across the country throughout the rest of the twentieth century, where it gradually mutated into a dish defined by the addition of copious amounts of chilli powder.
Every Tuesday at Quality Wines we have a curry as our staff meal, cooked by whichever chef was lucky enough to have worked the Monday prep shift. Seeing – and tasting – what people come up with is always one of my highlights of the week. Recently we’ve enjoyed lamb rogan josh, Malaysian kari ayam, Afghani chicken curry and Jamaican curry chicken. When my rare turn came around a couple of months back, and with a surfeit of pork cheeks without a home on the menu, I cast my mind back to that eye-opening pork vindalho, did some research and came up with the recipe below. I think it was a pretty close approximation to the dish we had at Horseshoe – the collagen-rich pork cheeks, with their seams of intramuscular fat, took very well to the complex spicing. I knew immediately I’d have to make it again at home, washed down with ice-cold lager.
Goan Pork Cheek Vindalhao
Like most braises, this dish gets even better if left to rest, so it can be made well in advance and reheated. It’s ideal for batch cooking or if you’re having friends over – all you need do is steam the rice.
