Chef Floyd Cardoz Returns to India
I am a big fan of chef Floyd Cardoz. At his New York restaurant, North End Grill, he cooks with the utmost love for fresh, local ingredients, using them delicately in ways that pull out copious amounts of warmth and subtle spice. I was once lucky to be a guest at a meal made entirely from produce grown in the restaurant's rooftop garden. At another dinner, we celebrated the Young Scientist Foundation, which Floyd helped establish with his winnings from Top Chef Masters. At our first interview we discovered a shared love of Goa - a city on the Arabian Sea in India with a huge Portuguese influence - where he summered as a child and where my godfather is from.Floyd recently returned to Goa to visit his mother in nearby Bombay and to speak at an event. In a meandering conversation at his restaurant, we poured over photos and he gave me a little glimpse into the food that so fascinates him from his home. Below is his story, smoothed out just a tad, celebrating what he's loved about India in the past and where he hopes the culinary scene heads in the future.
Return to India - Chef Floyd Cardoz Goes Home to Goa
By Floyd Cardoz, as told to Jacqueline Raposo
All photos by Floyd Cardoz, with a little love from Jacqueline
I came to the United States in 1987, when I was 27. I’ve been to India maybe six times since then, and I hadn’t been back in three years by the time I went on this trip.Growing up, every year the whole family would pack up in a car – six kids, mom, driver and maid – and we’d travel about 600 kilometers to Goa for a month-long vacation. Going to Goa was always about connecting with the old family, especially my great-grandmother on my mother’s side who we stayed with. She had this old, ancient kitchen where everything was cooked around a wood fire. There was no gas, no running water, and no electricity, so there were lamps lit at night, and the wood fire in the kitchen would be going 24-hours. And because there was no refrigeration we’d go to the market every single day; there was no menu, we’d see what they had and then cook that.My great-grandmother had these coconut plantations and rice paddies, so she would cook in earthen pots over the coconut husks, wood and shells, and all the food had a very strange, woodsy smell. She had her own chickens and pigs, too, so pretty much everything she grew we ate. Home was less than four miles from the Arabian Sea, so seafood was a big thing; in the morning the guys on the beach would throw out their nets and the maids would catch these small gold fish. I loved seafood, so for me it was a joy: shrimp, clams, crab, mussels, and tons of fish. I’d go to the beaches in the morning and collect small clams, and my grandmother would make cockle palau. As a kid that was always pretty damn cool.Normally the 2nd or 3rd day we were there the fatted pig would get killed, and that’s what we ate for the week. They wasted nothing, so they would save the blood and we’d make sausage meat, cure and salt some, and make stews out of the salted pork in earthen pots. Some sausage meat would be cured with salt and then made into wet sausage, with vinegar, chilies and garlic, in more of the Portuguese style. Even the innards - the lungs and the intestines and the kidneys - would go into one stew, and the liver and the belly meat would go into a stew called sorpotel. When I got off the flight in Bombay and went home my mom gave it to me as breakfast at three o’clock in the morning. My mom’s sorpotel is always a welcome attraction for all us kids and the first thing my sons always ask me; “Did you have Nana’s sorpotel?” When I go back to India it’s the first thing I want.Eating all those things again takes me back to why I love food, because my philosophy is, “Cook everything, waste nothing.” Because, if you go back three or four generations of every culture, no one ever only used tenderloin, or strip loin, or ribeye. My great-grandmother taught me the value of utilizing everything. She’s she was 96 when she passed away, about 30 years ago when I was still in Bombay. Then my grandmother died when she was 94, when I was in the United States.As a child my grandmother was very strict and would not allow us in the kitchen – I started later on in life trying with our cooks at home. Summers in Goa were all about the food; the breads we’d have for breakfast were these primitive, Goan breads made with palm sap as a fermenting agent. You get this guy on a bicycle in the morning with this typical horn that he presses, the poee man. I remember the poee; I had one on this trip. I remember drinking toddy, which is the unfermented sap from the coconut palm that, once it’s fermented, is used in the bread and alcohol. I had that on this trip, too.In Goa there are Hindu Goans, Muslim Goans, and Catholic Goans; all three cuisines are very, very different, and most Goan cuisine you see outside of Goa – the vindaloos, the fish curries – are Goan Catholic. It’s very seafood-based, being that it’s on the Arabian Sea, and the boats go on the water daily; so shrimp, crabs, spiny lobster, clams. Being that the Portuguese were long in Goa there’s a lot of pork and beef eaten, which is not very normal for most of India. You have the use of vinegar and alcohol. There are some Portuguese-style custards in the Catholic cuisine, and then there is Goan sausage – choris, from chorizo; in Portugal they grill it and in Goa we stew it with onions and potatoes or cook it with rice and make a pilaf out of it.Some of it does not taste as good as I remember, only because people don’t use wood fires to cook anymore. That’s the only difference in the food. But it still tastes really good.