Food porn: Mumbai seafood edition
This is from dinner last night at a place called Mahesh Lunch Home in the Fort neighborhood of Old Bombay (the city changed its name but the old part of town is still called "Bombay"
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This is prawns Koliwada, a traditional preparation from the Koli people who lived in Mumbai before the Marathis invaded in the 1500s. The prawns are marinated in vinegar, tamarind, and garlic before being breaded with gram flour and deep fried. (They say "prawns" when we would say "shrimp"; I think of "prawns" as just being the really big ones.)
Crab butter pepper garlic is an east Asian preparation that is very popular in India. Normally we get the tandoori crab with the shell still on; in this version they shell it for you.
Pomfret bhuna hua. Pomfret is an amazing fish (it's sometimes called butterfish in English) with a rich and buttery meat. "Bhuna hua" literally means "roasted"; as a preparation name it means it's cooked in a tandoor with a house spice mix.
The dry dishes above are usually eaten with a bread; we got the classic northern flatbread called naan, with garlic on it.
Squid Pondicherry curry. Pondicherry was the capital of French India and has a unique cuisine with a strong French influence. The Pondichery style of curry uses mustard oil, fenugreek, and coconut milk.
This is Keralan seafood ishtu. Kerala is the state at the very southern tip of the Indian peninsula, and it has a cuisine that is more reminiscent of Thai or Vietnamese food than what most Americans think of as "Indian food". The ishtu (it's apparently a corruption of the English word "stew" is a kind of chowder: a thick potato and coconut milk broth with cinnamon, cardamom, and bay and curry leaves. We got it with mixed seafood (fish, shrimp, and squid).
Ishtu is best enjoyed with appam, a south Indian pancake made of rice flour and coconut milk.
Finally, we got a prawn Hyderabad biryani. Hyderabadi biryani has a lot of chilis (very spicy) and is topped with fried onions.
Indian seafood is really underrepresented in America and I think people would love it if they got the chance to try it. If you're at an Indian restaurant and they have a seafood dish I strongly recommend trying it.
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If you don't make it I hope you won't be a sorrel loser.
You have a talent for bringing cookbook info to bear on any subject. 
Not to mention your excellent wordplay.
Last edited Sat Aug 29, 2015, 12:07 PM - Edit history (1)
so, is there a word that translates to "gringo"?In Hindi and Bengali, at least, "gora" (for men) and "gori" (for women) literally means "whitey" and is applied to caucasians (though it's not exactly as rude as a slur; it's probably closer to "gringo" in that sense, since it's just a colloquial way to make a factual statement about someone's race).
"Ferengi" is a broader and more contemptuous term for foreigners in general, as opposed to "desi", which means "from the country" (same root as in bangla"desh"
. Interestingly, it actually comes from the word "Frank", as in the medieval French tribe, because Frankish mercenaries working for Persia were some of the first Europeans that Indians came into contact with. Now it just kind of generically means "foreigner".like this? lol.
