Vindaloo Period COrigin theory CVerified

The name vindaloo comes from the Portuguese carne de vinha d'alhos (meat in wine vinegar and garlic), carried over into Konkani as विंदालू. In the first half of the sixteenth century, this preserving marinade was brought to Goa, on India's western coast, which had become Portuguese territory. Local Goan cooks replaced the hard-to-get wine with palm vinegar, the fermented vinegar of the coconut palm, added spices, and remade it into a dish of their own. That is the path of its localization; Franciscan friars, it is said, brewed from palm toddy the vinegar that stood in for wine.

The fierce heat of the dish comes from chili, but chili is a New World crop, and it did not exist in South Asia to begin with. The Portuguese carried it along the trade routes of their great voyages, and until the chili crossed the sea and took root in Goa, the fiery vindaloo of today had no way of coming into being. Once in Goa, the chili spread across India under the name 'Gowai Mirchis,' the chilies of Goa. The reckoning of its formation is that all of this followed Portugal's seizure of Goa in 1510.

The heart of the making lies in the sour marinade. The Portuguese original used wine vinegar; in Goa this was replaced with the local palm vinegar. It was not a step demanding any special equipment, but a substitution that could be reproduced directly in the local kitchen.

Who could cook the dish is not to be overlooked either. With pork among its main ingredients, vindaloo took root not among Hindus or Muslims, who avoid pork, but among the Catholic Goans converted to Christianity, as a food of the home and the market. Religion and dietary rule drew the outline of who the makers were.

A widely circulated story ties the '-aloo' of vindaloo to the Hindi aaloo (आलू, potato) and makes it a dish that must have potatoes. But the sound is a coincidence, and the source of a word is not the source of a dish. The root of the name is Portuguese vinha d'alhos — vinho (wine) and alho (garlic) — with no thread leading to the potato at all. Both the Oxford English Dictionary and Wiktionary note plainly that the two words only sound alike and are not related. The potato's entry into vindaloo is a secondary habit that arose later in India out of that accidental match of sound, not a ground of the dish's name or origin.

Trace the name to its source and the line of Goan localization from the Portuguese carne de vinha d'alhos stands out sharply. The agreement of the etymology, the history of the chili's arrival in Goa, the swap from wine vinegar to palm vinegar — several threads run together, and it is the scholarly consensus that Lizzie Collingham's Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors (Oxford University Press) treats in a chapter of its own. Vindaloo first appears in English writing in 1888, in Dawe's The Wife's Help to Indian Cookery (per the OED), where it is already noted as a 'Portuguese Karhi.' But the first time a dish is written down is not the moment it was born; that 1888 is only the earliest year it was set down in English, a separate thing from the sixteenth-century Goan origin itself.

There is another view. The food writer Pat Chapman holds that the vindaloo served in British restaurants does not descend from the Portuguese original but is a plain medium curry with vinegar, potato, and a great deal of chili added. It sets up a separate lineage from the Goan localization, but most of the sources reach back to the Portuguese original, and it has not overturned the consensus. How far the British curry-house vindaloo is continuous with the Goan original remains an open question.