What is Xit Kodi, you might ask? I'll tell you.. but first let me tell you how to pronounce it.


Kodi is simpler, just Ko and Dee, or how you would say the name Cody.




Most people who go to Goa as tourists eat fish curries with huge slices of surmai (king fish) or pomfret or rawas (Indian salmon) in it. But a Goan knows that the smaller the fish, the tastier the curry is.  So while we do use all the same fish I've mentioned in our curries, we also make it with the smaller, yummier anchovies, sardines, mackerel, red snapper, milkfish etc.

The curry is essentially a paste of grated fresh coconut, garlic, ginger, dry coriander seeds, cumin seeds and Kashmiri red chillies. As souring agents, we either use tamarind, kokum or raw mango. Sometimes, when it's a prawn curry, we add drum sticks or lady fingers (okra) for added flavour.

Traditionally the curry is eaten with our Goan boiled red rice. It tastes just as good with any plain white rice as well. Accompaniments like some lightly sauteed vegetables (garnished with grated coconut), fried fish or prawns or shell fish, beef chilly fry or spicy Goan sausages, take the experience to a whole other level.

This is our soul food, it's the food our ancestors ate centuries before us, tweaking the recipes as the years brought foreign influences to our shores. It's the food we share with our neighbours who live up north and further south. I have travelled all along the western coast of India, with the Arabian sea on one side and lush green paddy fields, coconut palms, and fertile red earth on the other. I always eat the fish curry wherever I go, and it is fascinating to see how it changes as the kilometres go by. The ingredients are more or less the same as I mentioned earlier, what differs are the proportions and the souring agents. In the Konkan and Malvan region of the west coast of Maharashtra, kokum is always used. In Goa and Mangalore, we use more of tamarind. As you go further down south to the coast of Kerala, you find the curries spicier, less coconut and more chillies, the addition of curry leaves, shallots (or sambar onions as they are called there) and something called kochumpalli as a souring agent.

The humble fish curry has so many different avatars! Even in Goa, it differs slightly depending on whether it's cooked in a Hindu or Catholic household. But it's delicious all the same. And we have so many variants... sometimes it's made only with coconut milk extract, and sometimes it's made both with ground coconut and coconut milk. Then there is the heavily Portuguese influenced Caldeen, which is a milder version that leaves out the red chillies and uses the extract of coconut ground in spices. Our foreign 'guests' who lived on our shores for 450 odd years loved the fish curry and used to call it Caril de Peixe. You can probably still find versions of it in some of the kitchens in Lisboa.