Despite the urban myth that you should tackle the hottest curry – a vindaloo – and accompany it with pints of lager in your local curry house, in India that is not what the dish is all about. Our odyssey, as you know, starts in Goa which was once a Portuguese colony and it is here that ‘carne de vinha d’alhos’ originated – the name literally just means “meat marinated with garlic and wine”.
Vindalho was taken to Goa in about the 16th century. The original ‘carne de vinha d’halhos’ is usually made with pork and is a festival dish – for high days and holidays – and when it arrived in India it was adapted to the local palette with the addition of local spices and the substitution of coconut palm vinegar for Portuguese malt vinegar. Chillies were added (which themselves were introduced to India in the same century by the Portuguese traders) and the Goans added their own twist by including tamarind, cinnamon, black pepper and cardamom as well as sugar in the form of jaggery (unrefined palm sugar). Preparation takes a full 24 hours. The traditional Goan vindalho doesn’t have potatoes, but sometimes the Portuguese ‘alhos’ is misheard as ‘aloo’ (the Hindi for potato), and so some Indian versions include them!