My father always had fascinating stories to tell, and the following was one such that I’ve heard on several occasions. It was the rollicking 60s, a time where Karachi was considered the Paris of the East, and as a fresh graduate from IBA my father went to visit a friend at the Metropole Hotel for dinner. The menu had a dish called ‘Mutton Vindaloo’, my dad ordered it, thinking it was some exotic dish. On its way from the kitchen, out came alloo gosht! And thus, at our home, alloo gosht was christened mutton Vindaloo of sorts. There is also the ‘Tindaloo’ a Bengali spicier version of the Vindaloo. Tindaloo is said to be so spicy that most restaurants do not carry it on their menu. Lizzie Collingham says in her book, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, Vindaloo is normally regarded as subcontinental curry, but fairly speaking it is a Goan adaptation of the Portuguese dish Carne de vinha d'alhos, or meat [soaked] and cooked in wine vinegar and garlic; and the term Vindaloo is simply a garbled pronunciation of vinho e alhos. When the Portuguese arrived in the subcontinent they found that the natives did not make vinegar. Franciscan priests solved the problem by manufacturing vinegar from coconut toddy. The [cooks] combined this with garam masala, tarmarind, black pepper, plenty of garlic, cinnamon, cloves, some of the spices, in search of which Vasco da Gama had made his way to the Malabar coast. But the key ingredient, which gave bite to the granular sauce of the Vindaloo, was the chillie. Like their Spanish counterparts in South America, the Portuguese in India had developed a liking for the fiery taste of the chilli pepper and they used it in excessive quantities in a Vindaloo.