VINDALOO, n. This word is far outside my expertise, but I looked it up this week because I was watching Cobra Kai on Netflix, which is a goofy show about punching and how being the protagonist of an 80s high school movie leaves you with emotional scars, and on that show, a minor character I had assumed was Muslim said something about “pork vindaloo.”
And I thought, wait, what, pork?
I cannot explain the decisions of the Cobra Kai writers, but my bafflement did lead me to google the history of vindaloo. Much like the word “ketchup,” discussed previously, the results surprised me. Vindaloo is an Indian dish, but etymologically, its name comes from Portuguese “carne de vinha d’alhos,” meaning “meat in garlic wine.” The meat in question, for the Portuguese, was pork: On their ships, they stored pork in garlic and wine vinegar to preserve it. My sources differ a little bit about whether it’s vinegar made from wine or a mixture of wine and vinegar—maybe after months at sea, there’s no difference—but either way the wine in question was probably Madeira, from the islands off the Northern coast of Africa that Portuguese sailors used as a port for long sea voyages to South and Southeast Asia.
When the Portuguese arrived in Goa in the early 1500s (“arrived” is insufficiently violent; they invaded and began a long period of colonial rule), Goan cooks adapted the dish, replaced the wine vinegar with a palm vinegar invented specifically for the purpose of this dish, and added locally available spices like cinnamon and cardamom. The chili peppers that I think of as a hallmark of the dish came from the Americas, where the Portuguese had also installed themselves as colonial rulers.
Vindaloo evolved a lot over the last few centuries. British colonizers in India liked to hire Catholic Goan cooks who had no religious restrictions about working with meat or alcohol, so the dish traveled with them, and then it became a standard menu item in Indian restaurants outside of India.
Portuguese carne de vinha d’alhos also has descendant dishes in the Americas and the Caribbean, such as Guyanese garlic pork and Trini garlic pork, which was once sometimes called “calvinadage,” an adapted pronunciation of “carne de vinha d’alhos,” just like “vindaloo.”
Speaking of empires and their impacts on language and culture, this week I finished reading Arkady Martine’s A Desolation Called Peace, sequel to A Memory Called Empire, discussed at length here. It’s not small-r romance but the series does have a beautiful, slowly developing romantic relationship between two women, one who is a high-ranking citizen of the sprawling space empire and one who is an ambassador from a tiny, independent, far-flung space station desperate not to get devoured by the empire. This book has all the same fascinations as the first one: identity, linguistics, poetry, political machinations, how to know if someone means what they say, how to know where one person ends and another begins. The books tackle this question on an individual, bodily level by featuring human characters who have neurological devices that connect them to other humans, but the question is also addressed on a grander scale—the empire and all the cultures it consumes. Plus there are aliens. And alien cats. It’s wonderful. Content warnings: violence, gore, body horror, sex.
Equally wonderful but completely different, the other book I read this week was Rosie Danan’s The Intimacy Experiment, a captivating contemporary romance novel about a former porn star (a cis bi/pan woman) and a rabbi (a cis het man) starting to date. Naomi, the former porn star, is Jewish but has never felt very connected to Judaism, and I found all her reflections about relearning the ethics and rituals really moving. This book is warm and funny and, like Danan’s first novel The Roommate, gorgeously written and very sexy. It deserves a five-thousand word essay exploring how great it is, but I don’t have time to write that, so you’re just going to have to trust me and read the book yourself. Content warnings: prejudice against sex workers, a main character has had nude pictures made public without their consent, sex.
That’s all for this week. See you next Sunday!
