Hello everyone,
Welcome back to another issue of Yesterday’s Curry newsletter - thank you so much for reading and for your continued support! For those of you who are new here, my name is Emma and I am a chef, cookery teacher, spice business owner and food writer based in London. I set up this newsletter to connect with my Goan heritage, and I hope you enjoy reading it!
A slight aside before I start this post; today is the Goan Cultural Festival at Cranford Community College in Hounslow, and I will be there! If any of you London based folk are there too, it would be great to meet - if you spot me around say hi, or message me on facebook here.
Right, where were we…
Before I delve too deep into the nuances of Goan cooking in this newsletter, I want to share a dish that was dear to me before I even knew what Goan food really was. That dish is Goan Filos.
Being mixed race Indian and Irish, and raised in London, I grew up eating lots of different types of food. My Goan grandmother who lived with us cooked several traditional Goan dishes, like ambot tik, crab curry, lime pickle, atol and meatball curry, to name a few. When I was young though, I hated spice. Anything resembling a curry was a big no-no and my mum would make me separate “English food” - It’s funny how things change. One dish which didn’t offend my sensitive child’s palate however was the sweet banana pancakes my Grandma always had ready for me when I came home from school. They were so moorish and distinctive in taste, with an unmistakeable flavour I now know to be cardamom. Filos are a traditional Goan tea time snack and I can only imagine that my Granny must have eaten them herself as a child growing up in South Goa, and cooked them for my mum and her siblings when they were young themselves.
As is typical of Indian grandmothers, only a handful of recipes were ever scribbled down on loose bits of paper. The vast majority were stored in her memory and most probably adjusted depending on the day. This is something I have definitely inherited and when I cook for myself and others, it’s always a bit of this and a bit of that and no two iterations of a dish are ever precisely the same. When it comes to sharing recipes however, I am training this out of myself, and employed a very rigid test and retest when perfecting the Goan filos to match the taste I had in the back corners of my memory.
So, while this is not a recipe passed down from my grandmother, in some ways it is.