What the Fork: From Kuswar Platter to Marzipan, Kunal Vijayakar shares India’s Christmas Specials

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It’s Christmas and it isn’t always about chunky, roast potatoes, bread sauce, glazed ham, classic roast turkey with stuffing, cranberry sauce, Brussels with chestnuts and sage, honey-roast carrots, crisp honey mustard parsnips, spiced red cabbage, bacon, sausage and prune. We in India, have our own Christmas foods and traditions. For example, in the Konkan region of India, especially amongst the Goan and Mangalorean Catholic communities, Christmas food is all about spicy vindaloo, sorpotel, goan buff roulade, pork assado (sliced roasted pork cooked in spices and vinegar), Kerala duck curry, appam and fish molly, erachi choru (Kerala style chicken pulao) to name a few. Traditionally, a variety of sweets are also cooked in the house, which is unlike any English Christmas pudding or German Christmas stollen. In Goa and Kerala, it’s called a Kuswar platter. Usually, a Kuswar platter has about 22 little sweet snacks that are all made at home. Preparations begin days in advance because making each of these delicacies takes time, effort and skill.

Let me start with a Goan speciality, it’s called coconut ice. No surprise since the Konkan Coast including Goa is blessed with an abundance of coconuts. Semolina and scraped coconut cooked with ghee, cashews, butter and sugar, the coconut ice has somewhat chewy, soft, grainy, and silky textures all at once. It’s like a coconut barfi but is often flavoured with rose or strawberry flavours or essence.

In Goa and Mumbai, ‘marzipan’ is a must during Christmas. Indian marzipan are moulded, coloured sweets in Christmas shapes like wreaths, bells, holly leaves, reindeer or berries. Marzipan is made traditionally with a thick paste of ground almonds, though cashew nuts turn out more economical and tasty. The paste is cooked with sugar syrup and then cooled in little moulds. It is quite similar to the fondant that bakers use to cover cakes.

Bolinhas made with semolina and coconut are Goan cookies which are crisp on the outside but soft, chewy and coconutty when you bite into them with a flavour of cardamom and nutmeg. Without bolinhas, your Kuswar Christmas sweets platter would be incomplete.

Rose cookies are called so because they are made in the shape of a flower. They are made using a special round iron mould in the shape of a flower with a long handle called ‘kokis achchuwa’ in Mangalore. These crispy, crunchy cookies are also known as Rosette cookies or Achu murukku in Tamil and Achappam in Malayalam. Rose cookies are traditionally deep-fried cookies and not baked. Made with freshly ground rice flour batter, coconut milk, sesame seeds and egg and sugar, they are crisp and crunchy.

Kidyon or Kul-kul look like little deep-fried worms, in fact, Kidyon even means worms. They are terribly addictive and once you’ve had a few, you cannot stop yourself from eating more of these deep fried sugary sweet little worms made out of maida, salt, sugar and egg, blended with coconut milk, deep-fried and then glazed with sugar.

Milk Cream is very popular in Goa during Christmas, because both the main ingredients — cashew and coconut — grow in abundance in the small coastal state. It is like a fudge made from milk and cashew nut and is made by grounding cashew nuts, condensed milk, sugar and butter, and really represents Christmas.

Neurios are a version of the Maharashtrian Karanji, or the North Indian Gujjiya. It’s a crescent-shaped puff pastry, packed traditionally with a delicious filling of coconut, sugar, poppy seeds and sesame seeds, but you can add nuts and raisins or any other indulgent ingredients that you may fancy. The outer pastry is flaky and made of maida and semolina, and is deep fried.

This is what makes our country fascinating. It’s through our food, which is so much more about which region we come from, rather than which religion we hail from. It’s what brings us together, whichever that festival may be.

Kunal Vijayakar is a food writer based in Mumbai. He tweets @kunalvijayakar and can be followed on Instagram @kunalvijayakar. His YouTube channel is called Khaane Mein Kya Hai. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.

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