Hello everyone,
Welcome to Yesterday’s Curry newsletter - thank you so much for reading and for your continued support! For those of you who are new here, my name is Emma and I am a chef, spice business owner and food writer based in London. I started this newsletter about a year ago now as a way to connect with my Goan heritage. Despite having only written a handful of essays over the course of the year, the readership of this newsletter has grown and grown in large part due to the sizeable Goan community who have seen and shared it on social media. For that, thank you!
While I’ve been very busy over the past few months launching my spice business, my newsletter has inevitably fallen the wayside, though I have never forgotten it. I keep coming back to wanting to make writing about Goan cooking my main focus, and now the spice business is at a point where it can “run itself” so to speak, I want to place my attention back here, and engage with all 1000 of you who currently read this, and long may that number continue to grow!
I want the next gen of this newsletter to be much more fluid and informal than it has been previously. When I started writing about Goan cuisine, imposter syndrome took over and prevented me from sharing all of my cooking. How could I write authoritatively about a cuisine I’m learning as I go? What if the way I was taught things growing up isn’t “authentic” enough? Or if I totally butcher a classic recipe with my own modern take on it?! But instead of letting that stop me from writing, that’s going to be what this is all about now. As a second generation, mixed race member of the Goan diaspora, I am not an expert (yet!) on traditional methods, but rather a classically trained British chef using a lot of trial and error to learn the ins and outs of Goan cooking, share my findings and experimenting in the kitchen.
I also want this newsletter to be way more of a community effort. I have met hundreds of Goans online (mainly through facebook groups) and the support has been immense. I hope that by adding discussion threads and cooking Q&A videos to this newsletter, you will all feel more a part of something, and that is what I want to create.
I also have tonnes of cheffy friends/fellow Brits who are familiar with Indian food as it is presented in restaurants and ready meals, but don’t know anything about Goan food. I think any fellow Goans would agree that Goan food is a whole genre in itself. The cuisine is so unique that it seems as though it is from a whole other country. This is of course as a result of the 450 year Portuguese colonisation of Goa from 1510 until 1961 which created a cuisine born of east meets west flavours and ingredients. I will talk about this much more at a later stage as I explore both the Portuguese influence found in Goan cuisine, but also the Hindu and tribal cuisines which existed before and after.
For now, I want to reintroduce my newsletter as an ongoing research project; let’s approach Goan cuisine from the basics like one would any topic. I want this to be useful both for those who don’t know anything about Goan food, and those members of the Goan community who are more well versed than myself. There will be trials and errors, recipes, journal entries, videos, discussions and most of all community.
I should mention that I do plan on including a paid membership to this newsletter so that I am able to dedicate much more time to writing and developing recipes on here. For free subscribers, you will still get most of the content but things like discussions, a private fb group and videos will soon be only for members. This won’t start for another month, but for those of you who would like to support this newsletter, you can upgrade here: Upgrade your membership
Next week I will be a posting a discussion thread so that you can all send me in any cooking related questions which I will answer in my first cooking Q&A video on 28th August.
See you all on the flip side
Emma x