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It’s barely days before Christmas that I arrive at the Figueiredo House, which has been home to one of Goa’s most influential families for over 430 years. The home abounds in the quaint and the eclectic — floor tiles imported from Italy, ballroom interiors featuring solid teak, chandeliers crafted from Belgian crystal and Ming vases scattered across the dining room.
Maria de Fátima Figueiredo de Albuquerque, the present owner of the Figueiredo House, which is home, museum and homestay, is coordinating several high teas and Christmas lunches, which she is going to host in her vintage dining space.
Besides typical Goan desserts such as the bebinca and the sticky treat, dodol, she also plans on including some Indo-Portuguese dishes — some of which have been made by her family for generations. “We do a dried codfish, which is boiled and then served with potatoes and vegetables. I also do a rabanadas, with a creamy custard centre, which people call the French toast. I don’t know why, as it is not from France,” she says.
The piece de resistance is the roast turkey, which is plated on a very unique porcelain platter, created especially for the Figueiredos. Taken out only once a year, it has a beautifully painted centre for the meat, and hollows on either side for the gravy. “You can keep water underneath to maintain the temperature. It is very heavy,” she adds.
![Pereira-Almeida Pereira-Almeida](https://img.etimg.com/photo/msid-42031747/et-logo.jpg)
If one were to peep into homes, across the country, around this time of the year, one would find a varied and vibrant Christmas table set by each family. Far from the stereotypical images of plum puddings and iced cakes, one would find seasonal produce and regional sensibilities shine through in the festive fare.
Kulkuls, sannas, guliyos, thali sweets, fruit wines, neureos, dohneiiong — these are just some of the delicacies that have been prepared by certain communities, over centuries, to celebrate Christmas.
According to The Calcutta Cook Book by Minakshie Das Gupta, Bunny Gupta and Jaya Chaliha, in Anglo-Indian households in Kolkata preparations for Burra Din start months ahead with the bottling of the kala jamun (Indian blackberry) wine. However, Pia Promina Dasgupta, a restaurateur, feels that Burra Din is not confined to any particular or community, but celebrated by all across Kolkata.
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Often, you will find the maacher matha (fish head) and Christmas tree in the same shopping bag,” she says.
Myriad versions of the Christmas cake are made with desi touches — from McCluskieganj in Jharkhand to Kolkata and Allahabad. The Calcutta Cook Book says kilograms of cake mixture, according to old family recipes, were handed over to the local rotiwala (bread man) three weeks before Christmas.
“The ingredients include karamcha, the Calcutta cherry, a sour fruit, preserved and coloured a brilliant red — manufactured by the Kabuli dried fruit sellers in New Market; petha, crystallised white pumpkin, another ingredient that is now added liberally as it is the cheapest of the preserved fruits; green cardamoms are added to cinnamon, and finally a generous measure of rum poured into the mix.” Then there is the Allahabadi Christmas Cake, which too features the petha, marmalade, sweet spices and heaps of ghee.
Each of the dishes adds to the warm gooey feeling the festival invokes. “This is not just about food, but about sentiments, ideas, stories and memories. It’s a very personal celebration.
Some of the recipes differ from one family to another,” says Thomas Zacharias, chef-partner, The Bombay Canteen, for whom Christmas evokes memories of family get-togethers at his grandmother Ammini’s home in Kochi, where she would make wine out of amla, grapes and pineapple and the table would be laden with stir-fried pork, duck curry and tenderloin frill.
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The Family Cook Book by Mrs KM Mathew — an institution, when it comes to the culinary heritage of the Orthodox Christian community — enumerates an entire menu for a Christmas feast cooked in her home. It includes palappam and stew, rice, irachi ularthiathu or fried meat, meen vevichathu or fish curry, meen varuthathu (fish fry), chicken curry, vegetable thoran, kachia moru (curd curry), pachadi, inchipuli or ginger chutney and more. As KT Achaya says in his book, Indian Food: A Historical Companion: “For Christmas, there may be wild duck, cooked as mappas, or roasted with stuffing.”
Reena Pereira-Almeida, who hails from Bassein (Vasai), home to a section of the East Indian community in Maharashtra, focuses on the art, cuisine and culture of the community through her project, the East Indian Memory Co. “Our food is a mixture of Portuguese, British and local Maharashtrian culinary influences, so our Christmas sweets tend to have a lot in common with the other Catholic communities of Mumbai,” she says. Families work together for days before Christmas to create the dodol, the thali sweets, date rolls, milk cakes and dainty marzipan.
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“Date rolls are super simple,” says Gresham Fernandes, culinary director, Impresario Hospitality and Entertainment Pvt Ltd, who belongs to the East Indian community. All you need is flour, butter and sugar, which is mixed and pulled out like a pasta dough. Seedless dates are filled with almonds or walnuts.
“They are then rolled in the dough and baked,” he says. “Then, there is the thali sweet, which is unique, because it is baked in a thali. Earlier, families didn’t have ovens, so they would take their mix to the local baker. That’s why there are so many bakeries around Bandra.
Each dish would bear a mark to signify which family it was from.” The mix contains rava or semolina, almonds — now cashews are used as well — sugar, eggs and Vanaspati to maintain that white colour. The nuts are ground with rose water. The mix is kept overnight so that semolina bloats up. No baking powder is used in the process. “The best part is the crunch at the base,” says Fernandes.
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On Christmas Eve, by the time families return from midnight service, there is a batch of pintyacha sop, or country chicken soup waiting. “The next day, lunch is an elaborate affair with dishes like duck moilee, indyal, or East Indian vindaloo, mutton stew and red chicken curry prepared with bottle masala gracing the table. These are usually accompanied with pulao, fugias — small fried balls of dough — bread rolls and a simple but colourful salad,” says Pereira-Almeida.
For Bengaluru-based Bridget White-Kumar, who presents the food of the Anglo-Indian community from the Kolar Gold Fields, Karnataka, through pop-ups, the highlight of the festival are kalkals, or kulkuls, which are a variant of the filhoses enroladas, a Portuguese Christmas sweet.
“These are crunchy, curled or shell-shaped, sweetened, fried dough,” she says. Sugar and flour are combined with eggs, milk and butter to a soft dough and then marble-sized balls are rolled on the tines of a fork or a comb to form a shell or a scroll.
![Thomas Zacharias Thomas Zacharias](https://img.etimg.com/photo/msid-42031747/et-logo.jpg)
These are deep-fried and later frosted or coated in melted sugar syrup. “Since preparation of kalkals is time-consuming and requires many helping hands, a day is assigned as Kalkal Day, before Christmas,” says Kumar.
There are certain traditions, which are fast fading away, in the era of ready-to-eat and packaged foods.
One such is gons, pronounced as gaush, in Goa. “Tender coconut is cut into strips, hung out in muslin cloth, then put in sugar syrup and placed on paper,” says chef Sarita Sacramenta Carvalho, who helms the regional restaurant, Tempero, at the ITC Grand Goa. One ritual that is still followed is that of kuswar: a platter of sweets being sent out to neighbours. “In olden times, landlords would send this out.
![Joel Basumatari Joel Basumatari](https://img.etimg.com/photo/msid-42031747/et-logo.jpg)
You couldn’t return the platter empty, so you would put in a sweet that you had prepared,” she says. Semolina seems to be the ingredient of choice when it comes to cakes, across regions, and it can be found in the Goan baath cake as well.
The other dish that is prepared is the neureos, or small pastries stuffed with coconut, raisins, dry fruits and then deep-fried to a golden brown. “For savoury, we have sannas, sorpotel and vindaloo. Christmas Eve is full of excitement, with drummers performing, sports events organised by the church, giving gifts, visiting old-age homes, and more. So, we usually prepare the neureos and go to Mass,” says Carvalho.
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Chefs and home cooks are trying to recreate these personal memories. At The Bombay Canteen, Zacharias has created a menu that pays tribute to the celebrations of various Christian communities.
On offer is braised oxtail from Goa in a hot and sticky jus served with rice pilau and winter carrots; the East Indian pork sambari, or roast pork roulade with East Indian-style curry; the Naga Galho, which is rice porridge served with raja mirch chutney, Naga pyaaz salad and pork innards curry. As a homage to his grandmother, who passed away a couple of years ago, he has also included Ammini’s duck curry, a boneless duck coconut curry with egg appams. Dasgupta, too, has created a special takeaway set for Christmas and New Year’s Eve, inspired by memories of a childhood spent in Kolkata.
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The celebrations in her grandmother’s home would be marked by loud crackers and a hearty meal of sausage and mash. When she got a little older, Dasgupta was allowed into her parent’s celebrations, which were typical of aristocratic Bengalis, and were held either at the Bengal Club or at home, in the form of contribution parties.
Leg of ham, suckling pig and whole fish were usually accompanied by pates, dips, foie gras bought during international travels, pastry cases with chicken or mushroom fillings, leafy salads and a boozy Christmas cake. Sometimes, there was chingri maach or smoked hilsa.
“The tables were extremely colourful. Salads were plated in pineapple shells. I would spend days making moulds of ice for the caviar to sit on,” says Dasgupta, who has put similar items such as tenderloin roast, steak and kidney pudding, lamb roast with mint sauce and salmon. At the Thangabali restuarant in Mumbai, which celebrates flavours from the southern states, the emphasis has been on Syrian Christian fare this festive season.
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On Saturday, the restaurant hosted a lunch, featuring dishes from the kitchens of management consultant Vinod G Nair and his wife Sarah Jacob. “Their food is very distinctive. Sarah does a boiled tapioca, or kappa puzhingiathu, with a pulichammanthi, a relish made with spices and coconut,” says Dharmesh Karmokar, cofounder of the restaurant. Then, there is a Syrian style chilli beef, an undercut that is roasted, pulled and tossed again in a pan. A gooey sweet, which is Nair’s own invention, is shallow-fried ripe banana, sprinkled with cinnamon and sea salt.
Dimapur-based Joel Basumatari, who combines hyperlocal ingredients, sustainable practices and modern techniques, gleaned from his experience at the Crowne Plaza London-Heathrow is doing a Christmas-inspired dessert with mocha-infused sweet potato mousse, Chantilly cream, roselle sauce and garnished with garden mint and edible ixora flower.
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The coffee used in the dessert has been sourced from Nagaland Coffee. “Every tribe in Nagaland has its own style of community feast,” says Basumatari, whose father’s tribe is Kachari, while his mother hails from the Sema and Angami tribes.
“Mechu ga, or pork innards, with blood and rice, forms part of the community feast during Christmas at a village called Tuophema, near Kohima. Pork with bamboo shoot is usually eaten as part of the feast after the church service. But I like to present my own take on local flavours, hence I am doing the special dessert.” Christmas is a many-splendoured treat.
(The writer is a Delhi-based journalist)
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