The Delhi Rd Kitchen
The Delhi Rd Kitchen Cookbook is a compilation of family recipes written in letters, exercise books, scraps of paper and the backs of envelopes. There are also some of our grandmother's recipes, originally written in Portuguese and translated by our dad, who yearned to replicate the delicious memories of his childhood food — ‘just like Mama made’!
It has taken a long time to plan and even longer to write, and is for everyone who sat around the table at Delhi Rd, wine glass in hand, enjoying the food and raucous conversation on a Sunday evening. But most of all, it's dedicated to our loving parents, Narciso and Grace de Lima, who taught us how to appreciate good Goan food, cooked with love and patience.
My earliest memory of our Dad's cooking was in Dar es Salaam, East Africa, where we lived from 1960 to 1967. Our African cook, Kondo — by now an expert in Goan food — cooked six days a week. On Sundays, his day off, Mum and Dad would cook instead, trying out one of their favourite Western dishes. Dad's ‘famous’ dish was a spicy sausage pasta: little chipolatas cooked in a tomato and recheado masala sauce, mixed with spaghetti and lots of cheese.
An Expat food festival took place every year in Dar, showcasing food from all over the world. The entry ticket entitled you not only to sample the dishes but to take home a copy of the recipes — which we still have today, and some of which Dad adapted to become his ‘own’.
In the mid-60s, when we moved to the UK as new immigrants, Kondo the cook and our Dad were left behind in Africa. Our Mum, Grace struggled to work, shop, cook and feed four constantly hungry children. When Dad eventually joined her in late 1968, 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, and Mum would cook the vegetable dishes and rice, chips or mashed potatoes when she came home from work. The weekend was when they had time to experiment with Goan recipes — rice, prawn curries and fish often on the menu.
This ritual carried on until our Mum's untimely death in 1992. 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 hold an annual Memorial Mass and party for her every year on 15th November, 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: plates of crispy beef patties fresh from the oven, golden fish croquettes, fragrant chutney sandwiches and lacy forminhas. The main meal followed — the now-famous Portuguese Fish Dish, pulao rice, fruity East Indian chicken curry and the legendary Xacuti — with the traditional Goan roast taking pride of place, and a rainbow of desserts to crown the feast.
Christmas was a lavish celebration too. When Nannie was alive, she and Dad shared the ritual of making and distributing Goan sweets, or ‘Kuswar’. After she passed, Dad took it upon himself to make the Kuswar. Come December the kitchen filled with bags of flour, mounds of sugar, grated coconut and fine semolina, and he would craft each sweet by hand: delicate Neureos filled with coconut, deftly curled Kulkuls, golden angel wings dusted with sugar, home-made toffee, and diamond-shaped gram Doce — stored in large empty tubs of ghee for Lorraine to parcel out among family and friends.
Dad's greatest passion was always cooking. Most Sundays he would make something special, then call around his children, grandchildren and close friends, waxing lyrical about the menu and asking who was coming to dinner. 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 — excited to see everyone, even though he was ill and could barely leave his bed. The following weekend, Dad was gone, and the family gathered for that final roast dinner, toasting our parents in the garden in the warm May sunshine.
