Fasting and feasting this Easter

Let’s be honest: Most religious festivals won’t be half as much fun without the delicious food that comes out of our mothers’ and grandmothers’ kitchens on festival days. Its no wonder then that though Easter (on March 31 this year) is a special time for Christians because that’s when they celebrate Christ’s resurrection and the triumph of good over evil, Easter is not Easter without some lip-smacking food.

The festival marks the end of a 40-day period of abstinence where devout Christians abstain from meat and alcohol. This perhaps explans why Christian communities in and around Mumbai — the East Indians, the Goans and the Mangloreans — go crazy cooking that day. Here are a few familiar and unfamiliar dishes that may turn up at a table near you.

Sorpotel
You can’t have a Christmas, an Easter or a wedding feast without sorpotel. It is omnipresent on most Goan, Manglorean and East Indian tables, with each family claiming theirs is the best recipe. It is made of finely-diced pork cooked in vinegar along with a cartload of spices. While Goans and Mangaloreans prefer to serve sorpotel with saanas — round rice cakes similar to the idli — or pao, East Indians choose fugyaas, or little fried balls of flour.

Recipe:
Sorpotel 1 kg Pork with fat, preferably stomach or leg

2-3 green chillies

2 piece of ginger

4 large onions

20 flakes of garlic

Finely Grind 14 Kashmiri chillies (de-seeded)

3/4 tsp peppercorn (dry roasted)

3/4 tsp cumin seeds (dry roasted)

1 1/2 tsp coriander seeds (dry roasted)

5 tbsp Goa Vinegar

1 1/2 tsp Turmeric

Tamarind (one walnut-sized ball soaked in warm water, squeeze out the juice and sieve)

Salt to taste

Method
Finely grind the Kashmiri chillies, peppercorns, cumin and coriander and put this in the vinegar. Keep aside.

Boil large chunks of the meat in two cups of water. Add more water if the pot is not covered. Boil the pork till the water reduces to half on a medium flame.

Remove meat from water. (Retain water. Skim layer of fat from the water) Cut off outer layer of skin. Cut the meat into small pieces and fry in the fat. 

After the pork is fried, put back all the meat into the same dish and keep on medium heat.

Finely chop green chillies, ginger and garlic, and add to the fried pork. 

Finely chop onions and fry with pork till nicely brown.

Add ground spices with tumeric to the pork and fry well.

Add a cup of water in which the pork was boiled. (Add more as needed).

Add salt, turmeric, vinegar to taste.

Add tamarind juice.

Cook well.

After it cools, refrigerate if the weather is too warm, otherwise leave out. Add a tsp of vinegar and heat again the next morning heat.

Each time you reheat, add a tsp of vinegar. Ideally, make this dish two days before you serve it.

Vindaloo
This curry, made with pork, mutton or beef, is another favourite. Since saanas, fugyaas and pao go well with both dishes, it is normal to find both sorpotel and vindaloo jostling for space at the dining table. Both dishes are ideal for feasts is because they can be stored for long periods of time because they are cooked in vinegar, a preservative. Families usually freeze and reheat these dishes even months later. And believe us when we say, the longer you keep these dishes, the better they taste. We speak from experience.

Roast pork/beef
Here’s another staple from the Easter feast table. A dry roast seasoned with spices, red chillies and roasted potatoes, both roast pork and roast beef are a perfect accompaniment to even a relatively simple meal of dal and rice the next day. Slivers of leftover pork and beef, lightly fried (or not) make the most delicious sandwiches too.

Manglorean chicken curry
Manglorean matriarchs can make a chicken curry that trumps any other chicken curry in India. And if you are lucky enough to eat that coconut-based curry with a Manglorean speciality, a flaky, dry dosa called bhakripito, you will be content for at least a week. For best results, line your plate with layers of broken bhakripito and cover it with spoonfuls of hot chicken curry. The curry will seep into the bhakripito to create a meal you will never forget.

Bath and bebinca
Dessert for a typical Goan family is usually generous helpings of bath cake made of coconut, and the traditional bebinca which can be eaten piping hot with vanilla ice cream. But since it is Easter, lunch and dinner will be incomplete without a basket of Easter eggs made of either marzipan or chocolate, thus marking the end to a perfect feast.

Twitter: @ClaudelleMonis