Curry

by Lizzie Collingham

  The Portuguese colonial empire was based on the control of trade routes. The Indian ports had always been strategically important. Here, the Arab trading world, which, at the end of the fifteenth century, reached from North Africa and the Mediterranean to the Bay of Bengal and Malacca in South-East Asia, overlapped with the trading world of China and Malaya and the spice islands of the Pacific Ocean. By dominating the oceans with their warships, the Portuguese now monopolised these trading networks. Linschoten noted that the Arabs required a passport from the Portuguese in order to conduct trade and that, despite a friendly manner, they regarded the Portuguese as deadly enemies.24 Nevertheless, the Portuguese were still dependent on a network of non-European merchants and money brokers. The Portuguese towns were filled with Gujarati Banians, Tamil and Telugu Chettis and Syrian Christians from south-western India, all trading with Chinese from Fukien province, and Arabs from Hormuz and Aden.

  Goa was distinguished from other Indian towns by the houses built ‘after the Portingall manner’, surrounded by gardens and orchards full of Indian fruit trees, and by ‘all sorts of Cloysters and Churches’. But the commercial areas looked just like any other Indian port. Linschoten described how the streets were lined with the shops of rich Indian merchants, each street specialising in particular wares. In one, the stores were piled with silks, satins, damasks and Chinese porcelain; in another, precious stones and lacquer furniture in every colour. Gold- and silver-smiths shared their street with coppersmiths, carpenters and craftsmen. Corn and rice merchants heaped up their wares in huge piles, and Brahman merchants sold spices craftily mixed with dust and rubbish. All around could be heard the tongues of the ‘Heathen Brokers very cunning and subtill in buying and selling’. In the galleries above the shops the ‘Barragios . . . or great bellies’ sat with their shirts open, their toenails being pared by slaves, while they nibbled dishes of conserves or took a nap. The Portuguese owned shops and workshops where their slaves made hats, shoes, sails and barrels. The streets were filled with diverse peoples – ‘Heathens, Moores, Iewes, Persians, Arabians, Abexijns [Abyssinians] . . . Armenians, Banianes of Cambaia, Gusarates and Decanijns’. The Portuguese, swamped by such diversity, were just one group among many, even in their own territory.25

  Portuguese society was itself made up of a number of layers. The upper stratum was composed of a small group of Portuguese officials who came to India only for a short term of three years. They enjoyed lives of great luxury in grand houses ‘with covered Balconies, and large Windows two Stories high, with panes of Oister shell’.26 Whenever they left their houses, they moved through the streets ‘very slowly . . . with a great pride and vainglorious maiestie, with a slave that carrieth a great hat or vaile over their heads, to keep the sunne and raine from them’.27 The officials wore elaborate and expensive European clothes, employed large numbers of Indian servants and owned many Bengali, Chinese and East African slaves. The viceroy at their head set the tone for their behaviour. He used his first year in India to repair and furnish his palace in Goa; the second year he spent amassing a fortune; the third year he prepared for departure. When the next viceroy arrived he found a palace with ‘not a stoole or a bench within, nor one pennie in the treasure’. On discovering his ‘bare and naked’ palace, the viceroy would renew the cycle. Linschoten concluded that no one in India could ‘looke for any profit or furtherance of the commonwealth by any Viceroy’ and that ‘the same is to bee understoode of all the Captaines in the Fortes, and of all officers in India’ who simply repeated his example on a smaller scale.28

  Below the layer of official Portuguese, a small army of soldados and sailors protected the trading posts and manned the ships. Their presence made the towns of Portuguese India rough and dangerous places. From June to September, when the monsoon winds meant that it was impossible for ships to put to sea, mobs of unpaid and hungry sailors would roam the town of Goa. Many of the sailors were former beggars and vagrants who had been impressed in Portugal, or they were convicts sentenced to serve out their time in India rather than in a Portuguese prison. Their quarrelsome presence meant that ‘everyone walks the City with his naked Sword in his Hand for his own defense at evening’.29 Often they were taken under the care of a nobleman, who would feed them and use them as a personal army. This meant that disputes between gentlemen often escalated into armed conflicts as they fought out their differences using bands of followers.30

  The bulk of the permanent Portuguese population in India were casados: merchants, money exchangers, shopkeepers and craftsmen. Some of these men had been attracted to India by the promise of making their fortunes, many were soldiers and sailors who had married and settled down in India. Very few Portuguese women emigrated to Asia and most casados married either Indian women who had converted to Christianity, or mestiços born to a Portuguese father and an Indian mother. It was the casados who European visitors persisted in thinking of as Portuguese, even though the women were Portuguese only by virtue of their marriage. Living in intimacy with the locals, the men had picked up many Indian habits and customs. Indeed, the disapproving argued that they had ‘adopted the vices and customs of the land without reserve’.

  A Jesuit padre was most disturbed by the Portuguese settlers’ licentiousness, which he attributed to the influence of the Indians. He complained that they had acquired the ‘evil custom of buying droves of slaves, male and female, just as if they were sheep’, sleeping with the girls and then selling them.31 If their morality was in question, so were their religious sensibilities. Linschoten observed that, despite being Christians, the Portuguese had incorporated certain Hindu practices into their behaviour. When they drank, they held the vessel ‘on high, and touch it not with their mouthes, never spilling a drop’.32 This technique ensured that they never came into contact with another person’s saliva which, in the eyes of a Hindu, was polluting. Their adoption of this manner of drinking indicated that the Portuguese men had adopted their Hindu wives’ religious scruples about purity.

  Cross-cultural exchange was hardly surprising, given that the majority of the Portuguese second generation had been brought up in a casado household organised by an Indian mother along Indian lines. As Linschoten observed, the women preserved their preference for rice over bread, and for eating with their hands rather than a spoon. When the family entertained, they maintained the Hindu custom of keeping the genders separate while eating, serving the men first and then consuming the leftovers. Although their refusal to eat with guests irritated the visiting British East India Company surgeon, John Fryer, he nonetheless thought Portuguese women excellent cooks. They made the best mango pickle, he enthused, ‘and dress Meat exquisitely, not to put the Stomach to much trouble, but such as shall digest presently; Supoes, pottages, and varieties of Stews, in little China dishes or Plates, which they shift before you are cloy’d, and at a common Entertainment after half a dozen Modes: Their relishing Bits have not the Fieriness of ours, yet all the pleasure you can desire; and to speak truly, I prefer their ordinary way of ordering Victuals before any others’.33 The food served in Portuguese households was not all Indian, however. Like most emigrants, the men preserved a taste for the dishes of their home country and they introduced a variety of Portuguese dishes to India.

  Although Portugal was a small country, its cuisine combined influences from a wide range of cultures. The ecology of the Iberian peninsula was suited to the cultivation of wheat, pigs, sheep, olive oil and the various manifestations of the grape, that is, must (grape juice), verjuice (the juice of unripe grapes), vinegar (soured wine) and wine. But Portuguese cooking also incorporated foodstuffs and recipes from a wide range of cultures. Jewish settlers and Moorish rulers had introduced rice, almonds, pomegranates, citrus fruits and sugar from the Near East. The European spice trade provided a steady supply of important flavourings such as black pepper, cloves and cinnamon. And, after Columbus’s voyage of 1492, Spain and Portugal were supplied with curious new ingredients from the Americas, such as tomatoes, potatoes
, maize, cashew nuts and turkeys. A stew of chicken simmered with cloves, cinnamon, black pepper, saffron and a little vinegar and thickened with ground almonds was standard Portuguese fare during the sixteenth century.34

  In southern India rice was the staple crop. Cardamom bushes, pepper vines and clove trees thrived in the lush green forests. Ralph Fitch, one of the first Europeans to reach India overland, described black pepper growing in the fields around Cochin, ‘among the bushes without any labour, and when it is ripe they go and gather it. The shrubbe is like unto our ivy tree; and if it did not run about some tree or pole, it would fall down and rot. When they first gather it is greene; and then they lay it in the sun, and it becommeth blacke.’35 South Indian sauces were thick with these spices. They were also marked by a sour note, derived from the tamarind, which had been introduced into India from Africa by Arab traders. Groves of coconut palms lined the coast and coconut milk was used as a base for many sauces while ground coconut was used as a thickening agent. The marriage of these two culinary styles produced Goan cuisine.

  The Portuguese in India particularly missed leavened wheat bread. South Indians sometimes used wheat to make unleavened flat chapattis, but they preferred soft rice breads made with a fermented batter of ground rice and lentils. This batter produced a surprising range of breads: idlis, which are soft and puffy (like light doughnuts) and eaten with chutney; appams, which have a spongy centre and a crispy fringe and, soaked in coconut milk flavoured with cardamom, make a good breakfast; and dosas, thin rice pancakes which are wrapped round a variety of spicy vegetable fillings. But for the Portuguese it was not simply a matter of missing the taste of crusty loaves. Wheat bread was of enormous religious significance to sixteenth-century Europeans. It was the only substance with which it was permitted to celebrate Mass and the Portuguese settlements were populated by large numbers of Catholic missionaries. The Portuguese therefore went to great lengths to make bread in a country where this was very difficult. The problem was that yeast, essential to the success of a white wheat loaf, was unavailable. The ingenious Goan cooks used toddy (alcohol made from the sap of the palm tree) to ferment the dough, with, as a European traveller in Goa in the 1630s found, good results. He reported that ‘good white wheat bread’ was available in Portuguese India.36 In fact, the Portuguese added a variety of European breads – crusty white rolls, soft croissant-like breads called burbuleat and the sweet milk bread pao de lo – to the Indian repertoire.37 Even when India was under British rule in the nineteenth century, and many British foods had been introduced into India, according to a British soldier on leave, the Portuguese in Goa continued to make the best leavened bread in western India.38

  One of the culinary legacies of Moorish rule on the Iberian peninsula was the pride cooks took in preparing sweet dishes made from eggs and milk.39 It was natural, therefore, for Portuguese bakers to introduce such confections to India alongside their wheat breads. The Portuguese specialised in pastries such as dariols, a favourite European sweet in the sixteenth century. A dariol was made of milk (although more often medieval European cooks used almond milk which kept far longer), eggs and sometimes fruit, fish or bone marrow cooked in a pastry shell.40 Their other speciality was fragrant egg custard, a style of dessert entirely new to India where sweets were usually made of milk boiled down to the point where it solidified, or of ground lentils bound together with ghee and flavoured with a spice such as cardamom.

  In 1638 Albert Mandelslo, a young German on a tour of the East Indies, enjoyed Portuguese confections when he dined at the College of St Paul in Goa. The Jesuit college educated young Indian converts in Christian doctrine, Latin, Portuguese and music.41 Its table was set with ‘fruit and bread’ and they ate ‘several courses, both of flesh and fish, all excellently well dressed’ served in ‘little dishes of Porcelain’. The meal was brought to a close with a delightful dessert of ‘tarts, Florentines, Eggs drest after the Portuguez way, admirably well perfum’d, Marchpains [marzipan], and Conserves, both dry and liquid’.42 Portuguese bakers passed on their skills to their Indian wives, who soon acquired a reputation for making exquisite confections.

  In Bengal, the Portuguese taught the art of confectionary to the Moghs: the latter were Bengali Buddhists who for centuries had been employed as deckhands and cooks on the Arab trading ships sailing across the Bay of Bengal to South-East Asia. When the Portuguese established their base in Bengal at Hughli and took over the trade from the Arabs, they also took over the Arab tradition of employing the Moghs on their ships. Before long the Mogh cooks became accomplished bakers and confectioners.43 Bengal was well supplied with bakers’ shops selling light and crumbly pastries and delicately flavoured egg confections to the eager Bengalis, who were renowned for their passion for sweets. Even the Frenchman François Bernier, who was generally scathing about the quality of food to be found in India, thought that Bengal was a ‘place for good comfits, especially in those places where the Portuguese are, who are dexterous in making them, and drive a great trade with them’.44 Two hundred years later, the same English soldier who praised Goan bread, acknowledged that despite the debased state of the Portuguese, ‘in this one point their descendants have not degenerated’.45

  Over time Goan cooks replaced the European ingredients in Portuguese cakes with others more easily available in India. Coconut milk was used as a substitute for fresh cow’s or almond milk. Jaggery, the hard lumps of raw sugar made from the sap of the palm tree, replaced the more refined sugars used in Europe. Ghee supplanted fresh butter. The far more common and cheaper rice flour took the place of wheat flour.46 Goan confections were clearly derived from Portuguese cakes and pastries but they took on a distinctively Indian flavour. Bebinca is a typical example of the Goan adaptation of Portuguese cake-making traditions. It is made from a batter of coconut milk, eggs, and jaggery. A thin layer of the batter is poured into a pot and baked, then another layer is added, and so on until the cake forms a series of pancake-like layers. Ideally, it should be baked in an earthen oven fuelled by coconut husks which impart a smoky flavour. Bebinca travelled with the Portuguese to Malaya, and from there to the Philippines where the cooks dispensed with the time-consuming layers. From the Philippines bebinca continued on its extraordinary journey to Hawaii where it transmuted into butter mochi, a fudge-like rice-flour dessert.47

  Portuguese cooking was strongly meat-based. Lamb, pork and beef were the most favoured meats. Pork was, of course, forbidden for Muslims, as was beef for Hindus, and many Indians were vegetarian. Indifferent to the feelings of the indigenous population, the Portuguese continued to eat all these meats whenever they could. This was not unusual. What is striking, however, is that they succeeded in changing the eating habits of the Indians living in their territories. By the 1650s Jean-Baptiste Tavernier reported that beef and pork were ‘the ordinary foods of the inhabitants of Goa’, and Christian Goan cuisine today uses a great deal of meat, especially pork.48 Nowhere else in India did European settlement have this impact. The British certainly did not persuade their subjects to relinquish their taboos on meat consumption. The Portuguese achieved this feat by a campaign of mass conversion to Christianity begun only a few years after they had established themselves in India in the 1540s.

  The English ship’s captain, Alexander Hamilton, declared that Goa at the end of the seventeenth century was ‘a Rome in India’ it was so overrun with Catholic missionaries. He thought them ‘a pack of notorious Hypocrites’ and the ‘most zealous Bigots’ of the Roman Catholic Church to be found anywhere. While the Portuguese were establishing their Indian territory in the mid-sixteenth century, the Counter-Reformation was just beginning in Europe. The Portuguese, heavily influenced by an aggressively Catholic Spain, brought their religious concerns with them to India. A number of religious orders established monasteries in Goa and throughout the 1540s the friars made vigorous efforts to convert the Indian population. In 1560 the Inquisition, which had been established in Portugal in 1531, was introduced to India to ensure tha
t the Christian faith had been firmly established among the converts.49 The Goa Inquisition gained a reputation for being terrifyingly severe and the announcement that the Inquisition was at the door was enough to turn most Portuguese householders pale.

  One tale claimed that a man uprooted his prized mango tree after an encounter with the Inquisition. A messenger from the Lord Inquisitor had appeared at his door. The visit turned out to be innocuous – the Lord Inquisitor simply wanted to taste some of the fruit from the famous tree. A basket of mangoes was dispatched, but the feeling of dread which had overwhelmed the man had so shaken him that he did not wish to repeat the experience.50 Hamilton claimed that the Jesuits were such bullies that the laity in Goa were confined to eating only ‘stale or stinking Fish’. The fishermen dared not sell ordinary customers any fish until the churchmen had bought up all that they wanted. By way of illustration, Hamilton told the story of a gentleman friend who bought the last parcel of fresh fish from the fishermen. A priest arrived soon afterwards and demanded that he hand over the purchase. When he refused, explaining that ‘he had some friends to dine with him, and could not spare them’, the priest denounced the man using ‘scurrilous language’. He gave a tart reply which so incensed the priest that he threatened to have the gentleman excommunicated. The matter was only resolved after Hamilton’s friend paid a sum of money and suffered the humiliation of begging his pardon on his knees in front of the archbishop.51

  As soon as it was established, the Inquisition instigated a series of harsh measures in an effort to root out Hinduism in the Portuguese-controlled areas. Seven years after arriving in India the Inquisition had destroyed almost all Hindu temples in the Portuguese territory. Edicts were issued ordering all Brahmans to sell their property and leave the territory. Those Hindus left behind were forbidden to perform many of their religious ceremonies and ordered to attend preaching on the Christian doctrine. An edict instructed that all public posts should be reserved for Christians. Orphans (defined as children whose fathers had died but whose Indian mothers were often still living) were seized by the Church and brought up as Christians. In response, Hindus deserted Portuguese India en masse.52