Hi Wow

Vindaloo is actually two things.

1. vin daa loo

Spicy, fatty pork dish from Goa, incorporating the glorious Southern Indian coconut and spices tradition with the Protuguese pork culture and coming up with a sublimely delicious (f your palate and liver can take it) dish, that goes hand in hand with other Goan classic like sorpotel (shorrpo-thell) {almost exclusively diced cubes of pork fat cooked in a deep red 'sauce' of melted fat!!) and Goa(n) sausage - not like any other suasage I've seen, been a set of approximately one inch in diameter 'beads' of meat and spices wrapped in dried crackly 'skin' all held together by string (and you throw away the skin and string when you cook it). Recommended that these dishes be eaten with rice, a glass of cashew feni on the side (remember that every bodily juice will stink of this liquor for the next week)*, and followed up by the heavy, multi-layered unleavened cake called Bebinca (usually pronounced bay-bee(n)k).

2. vin duh-loo
Dish native to the UK, based upon the famous indigenous 'curry' cuisine which uses Indian names and a well-graded system of 'spiciness' to rank curries from mild through medium to hot. Vindaloo, along with Madras, is one of the hottest curries available on the standard curry scale. The curry industry is run primarily by immigrants from Bangladesh, and appears to consist of the creation of:

a. Sauce number 1 - orange, thick, mild, made primarily of tomatoes
b. Meat selection - diced lamb, chicken (pork for something exotic)
c. Style selection - chooped onions for 'dupiaza' dishes, melted butter for 'makhni' etc. And a 'quickspice' attachment, no doubt, to bring the dish up to strength on the scale.

Vindaloo is by way of being the national dish of Britain. Forget all you're heard of rosbif, or fish'n'chips in newspepr, recent surveys have shown that curry is without question the most popular cuisine in terms of restaurant numbers and restaurant visits/take-out orders, with vindaloo being the most popular curry strength. Now let's see the French say that English cooking has no flavour - we've got more than 7 distinct strengths of curry. So there!

cheer

the sunshine warrior

*Actually, though fenni is the native Goan liquor, it is foul. I recommend, rather, a cold bottled beer (nice, big 650 ml bottles in India), and if you're in a beach shack, do not feel ashamed to ask them to put ice in your beer. It'll hardly dilute the strength, since you'll be drinking it so quickly, but it will help keep it cool.