Goan food: what to eat and where to find it

Start with fish curry rice, the everyday lunch of almost every Goan household: a coconut curry, soured with kokum or tamarind, with mackerel, kingfish or prawns, served with red parboiled rice and a fried fish on the side. From there, explore the Catholic classics and the Hindu ones. The table below is the short list we give guests.

Goa is one of the few places in India where bread is part of daily life. Every village once had its poder, the baker who cycled round at dawn with a basket of pão, sold by the dozen. Poee is a round wholewheat pocket bread; kankonn is a hard, bangle-shaped loaf; and the soft square pão is eaten with bhaji, a spiced vegetable curry, for breakfast. The poder's horn is still heard in some villages.

Goan chouriço, the spiced pork sausage, is another Portuguese inheritance: pork cubed with chilli, garlic, vinegar and spices, stuffed into casings, smoked or sun-dried and sold in long strings in the markets. It turns up in chouriço pão, in pulao and fried with onions and potatoes. Other dishes with Portuguese names, caldeirada, a fish stew, and assado, a roast, have been thoroughly Goanised over the centuries.

Sweets show the same blend. Convent kitchens in Old Goa are credited with many of them, using the egg yolks left over after whites were used to starch linen and clarify wine: bebinca, baath, a semolina and coconut cake, and doce, a chickpea and coconut fudge. Alongside them sit sweets of older Konkani origin, made with rice, jaggery and coconut, such as patoleo, steamed in turmeric leaves for the feast of the Assumption in August.

Feni is Goa's own spirit, and it has protected status as a Goan product. Cashew feni is distilled from the fermented juice of cashew apples, the fleshy fruit attached to the nut, in the hill villages from about March to May. The first distillation, urrak, is lighter and seasonal, drunk with lime, soda and a green chilli; the second, feni proper, is stronger and keeps all year. Coconut feni, distilled from palm toddy, is made along the coast year-round.

Other drinks worth trying are kokum sherbet, sweet-sour and cooling, fresh cashew apple juice in season, local beers and the wines made in Goa and nearby Maharashtra. Port-style tonic wines are a Goan Christmas habit. Feni is strong; drink it slowly and keep a driver.

Three ingredients from Goa's own hills and groves run through almost every meal. Cashew trees, brought by the Portuguese from Brazil in the 16th century to hold the soil on the laterite slopes, now cover much of the hinterland. The nuts are roasted, salted, spiced or ground into sweets, and Goan cashews, graded by size and colour, are among the most popular things visitors take home. The fruit, the cashew apple, goes to the distilleries.

Kokum, the dried rind of a fruit native to the Western Ghats, gives Goan curries their gentle sourness and a faint purple tint. Soaked in water with sugar it becomes a sherbet; with coconut milk, garlic and green chilli it becomes sol kadi, drunk at the end of a meal to cool the palate. Coconut is everywhere: grated and ground for curries, pressed for milk, its sap tapped for toddy, vinegar and jaggery. A Goan kitchen without a coconut grater is hard to imagine.

Goan food is at its best on feast days. Each Catholic village celebrates the feast of its patron saint with a mass, a fair and a family lunch that may run to sorpotel, chicken xacuti, pulao and a dessert table. Christmas brings the consoada, a tray of homemade sweets exchanged between neighbours: kulkuls, neureos, perad, dodol, marzipan and bebinca. Weddings are celebrated with roast meats, sannas and long speeches.

Hindu Goa feasts at Ganesh Chaturthi, usually in August or September, when families gather for days of vegetarian meals, sweets of rice and jaggery such as modak and nevri, and visits between homes. Shigmo in spring and the temple jatras bring stalls of fried snacks, sugarcane and sweets to the temple squares. If your dates coincide with a village feast, we try to find you an invitation or a seat at a nearby table.

Goa's markets are where its food is easiest to understand. Go early, before 9.30 am, with a guide who can explain what you are seeing and help you buy.

• Panjim municipal market: fish, poee, chouriço, kokum, with Mario Miranda's murals on the walls
• Mapusa, Friday market: the most local, with village produce, pottery and pickles
• Margao market: spices, dried fish, cashews, dodol and perad, guava cheese
• Anjuna, Wednesday in season: more flea market than food, but good for spices and cashews

We build food days around the markets in the morning, a long lunch at a family-run restaurant or in a private home, and dinner at a restaurant chosen for its Goan cooking. In Salcete, we can arrange a cooking session with a Catholic family, making a fish curry, cafreal and sannas, the soft rice cakes leavened with toddy; near Ponda, a spice farm lunch on banana leaf shows the Hindu side. A feni distillery visit in spring completes the picture.

Seasons matter. The monsoon months, June to September, are the time for fresh-water fish, wild greens and mushrooms, with sea fishing paused for about two months. Mangoes, including the prized Mankurad, arrive from April. Christmas brings sweets such as kulkuls, neureos and dodol made in every Catholic home. Tell us your dietary needs and we will brief every kitchen.

A word on beach shacks. Many are cheerful places for a cold drink and a plate of fried calamari at sunset, but their menus are written for visitors and rarely show Goan cooking at its best. For a real fish curry or a proper xacuti, look for the small, busy restaurants in Panjim, Margao and the villages, where the customers are Goan and the menu changes with the catch.