Goa’s monsoon dish of ‘kalchi kodi’ trumps the State’s pork fest of ‘sorpotel’, ‘assado roast’ and ‘vindaloo’

The robustly flavoured, almost neon orange hued, fresh coconut-based kalchi kodi is one that matures deliciously with time and is best savoured days after preparation

I grew up in a household obsessed with any and everything that percolated from the great ‘Motherland of Goa’ to our slightly attenuated  Bomaicar (Bombayite) Goan existence here in Mumbai. Never mind losing a fair bit of heft along the short, but telling journey.

Sure, my sister’s and my “native language” of Konkani was so rusty and diluted with words from the borrowed Marathi, that it was quickly relegated to the status of a fourth language. After the more practical (as my less sentimental mother put it!) English, Marathi and Hindi. But my food- and music-loving father always made it abundantly clear that the two aforementioned aspects of his brand of  Goenkar-ness were not to be trifled with. 

This meant that we kids were introduced to an entire phalanx of performing artists and musicians from a very early age. Be they  fado and  mando singers, or the rather ribald humoured  teatre (Konkani theatre) artists. They all made their quotidian and unavoidable presence felt in our drawing room. 

Pernickety about his food to an almost militant degree, Dad made sure our Goan food supplies never ran dry. This meant regular grocery replenishing trips to Goa. For he had a lifelong distrust of the local Goan speciality stores that dot places like Crawford Market and Dhobi Talao in South Mumbai.

The trips would entail stocking up on  sur (palm vinegar), bundles of dried, salted fish, smoked  choriso pork sausages, fat red rice,  sollas (dried mangosteen) and pyramid-shaped black jaggery blobs. Among a truckload of other goodies purchased at the famous food market in North Goa’s Mapusa.

But there was always method and reason to his apparent ‘hoarding madness’. For you see, Goan cuisine is one of the finest examples of how preserved, pickled and even dishes cooked days in advance, far outnumber their freshly-made counterparts. Both in terms of variety and above all, depth of flavour.

And at the pinnacle of these made-yesterday-savoured- tomorrow wonders — that include the triumvirate pork fest that is the pickle-like  sorpotel, the  assado roast and the vinegar-imbued  indiyal ( vindaloo) — is the surprisingly humble and plebeian, entirely vegan  kalchi kodi. So popular is this almost neon orange-hued, fresh coconut-based curry that it even has a ditty dedicated to it. The 1969 song ‘Kalchi Kodi’ by one of Dad’s favourite singers, the legendary Alfred Rose, is a paean to this dish that I have grown up both devouring... and yes, listening to with relish!