This cookbook is a tribute to our Mum & Nannie, Grace nee D'Cruz, and Dad & Grandad, Narciso de Lima, whose mouth-watering Sunday night dinners were so memorable. Filled with laughter and love.they taught us how to appreciate good Goan food, cooked with love and patience.
The ‘Delhi Rd Kitchen’ Cookbook is a compilation of family recipes gleaned from letters, handwritten in exercise books, on scraps of paper and even on the backs of envelopes. There are also some of our grandmother’s recipes, originally written in Portuguese and translated by our Father, who yearned to replicate the delicious memories of his childhood food ‘just like Mama made’!
The Journey
My earliest memory of our Dad’s cooking was in Dar es Salaam, East Africa, where we lived from 1960 - 1967.
Our African cook Kondo, who by now was an expert in Goan food, cooked 6 days a week. On a Sunday it was his day off, so our Mum and Dad would cook instead and try out one of their favourite Western dishes.
Dad’s ‘famous’ dish was spicy sausage pasta - little chipolatas cooked in a tomato and recheado masala sauce, mixed with spaghetti and lots of cheese. Mum’s favourite recipe was another pasta dish, Doris’ American casserole. Dad loved to experiment with food and replicate dishes that he had eaten at restaurants or parties.
An Expat food festival took place every year in Dar, and showcased food from all over the world. It included Chinese, Indian, Greek, Italian, Polish and English cuisines, to name a few.
The entry ticket entitled you not only to sample the dishes but also to have a copy of the recipes, which we still have today. I’ve included some of the recipes in this recipe book, which Dad adapted to become his ‘own’.
In the mid 60’s, when we moved to the UK as new immigrants, Kondo the cook and our Dad were left behind in Africa.
Our Mum struggled to work, shop, cook and feed four constantly hungry children. It was a steep learning curve, but when Dad eventually joined her in late 1968 both of them were working and Mum was often ill, so they decided to share the cooking.
Dad would cook five days’ worth of meat dishes at the weekend and store them in the chest freezer. Mum’s job was to cook the accompanying vegetable dishes and rice, chips or mashed potatoes when she came home from work.
The weekend was when they had the time to experiment with Goan recipes, with rice, prawn curries and fish often on the menu.
This cooking ritual carried on until our Mum’s untimely death in 1992, long after their children had left Delhi Rd to have families of their own and just the two of them were left at home.
After Nannie passed away at 67, Grandad faced a sad reality: their eight grandchildren—all under five, with another on the way—might lose their precious memories of Grace.
His answer was to have an annual Memorial Mass and party for her every year on November 15th, Nannie’s birthday.
What started as a simple remembrance
blossomed into a lively celebration of family and Goan hospitality. After Mass, Delhi Road would come alive as friends and family gathered to remember Nannie.
The afternoon would unfold in typical Goan style—beginning with plates of Goan snacks:
crispy beef patties fresh from the oven, golden fish croquettes, delicate, fragrant chutney sandwiches, lacy forminhas, and the newcomer to the snack plate, samosas.
The main meal would then follow, including the now ‘famous’’ Portuguese Fish Dish, pulao rice, fruity East Indian chicken curry, and the ‘legendary’ Xacuti. The traditional Goan roast would take pride of place, while a rainbow of desserts—lovingly prepared by friends and family—would crown the feast.
Christmas was also a lavish celebration in any Goan family and when Nannie was alive, the ritual of making and distributing Goan Sweets, or ‘Kuswar’, was shared between them.
When she passed away, our dad still wanted his grandchildren to remember this much-loved Goan tradition and so he took it upon himself to make the ‘Kuswar’ himself.
Come December, Delhi Rd kitchen would be filled with bags of flour, mounds of sugar, grated coconut and fine semolina. Dad would diligently craft each sweet; delicate Neureos filled with coconut, deftly curled Kulkuls, golden angel wings dusted with sugar, home-made toffee that melted in your mouth, and diamond shaped gram Doce.
The treasures were carefully stored in large empty tubs of ghee and the task of distributing the sweet parcels among Chris, Lilian, and our circle of friends fell to Lorraine.
Dad’s greatest passion was always cooking, and most Sundays he would cook something special, trying out new dishes from his numerous cookbooks, or cooking up one of his grandchildren’s favourites like Army Dish.
He would then call around to his children, grandchildren and close friends waxing lyrical on what was on the menu that night and asking who was coming to dinner.
Of course, there were never any shortages on uptake and these lively dinners are fondly engraved in his grandchildren’s memories.
Our final memory of Dad’s food was ‘The Roast’ which he had lovingly prepared and put in the freezer for Easter when all the family were to come together. He was excited, anticipating seeing all his children and grandchildren and planning what else he would cook for the meal, even though he was ill and could barely make it out of bed.
The following weekend, Dad was gone and the family gathered together for the final ‘Roast dinner’. Toasting our parents in the garden, in the warm May sunshine, we nostalgically remembered all the love and food we shared together over the years in our Delhi Rd Kitchen.