The East Indians are Mumbai’s old Catholic community — Konkan-coast families converted under Portuguese rule around Bombay, Salsette, Bassein (Vasai) and Thane, who took the name ‘East Indian’ in the British era to set themselves apart from later Catholic arrivals. Their kitchen braids Portuguese, Maharashtrian and British threads, and it includes a spiced pork sausage: pork shoulder ground or cut small, mixed with a red chilli, garlic and vinegar paste and the community’s bottle masala, stuffed into hog casing, tied into links and air-dried for a few days. It is cooked, not eaten raw — fried with onions and potatoes, or added to pulao. The diagnostic detail is the bottle masala, a roasted blend of twenty or more spices that families make once a year and store in bottles, which gives a deeper, more toasted spice than Goan chouriço’s fresh masala. In fact family recipes split: some build the sausage on bottle masala, others on a vindaloo-style paste of Kashmiri chillies, garlic, cumin, turmeric and vinegar. This recipe uses both. I have not made this one yet; the formula is built from East Indian community recipes and is untested.
Ingredients
MEAT BLOCK (2,270 g / 5 lb), % of meat weight
- 2,270 g (5 lb) pork shoulder (Boston butt), about 25% fat, some skin included if you have it — 100%
CURE (% of meat weight)
- 50 g fine salt (2.2%)
- 5.7 g Cure #1 (0.25%) — 2.5 g/kg = 156 ppm nitrite
SPICE (% of meat weight)
- 68 g East Indian bottle masala (3%)
- 34 g dried Kashmiri chillies, soaked (1.5%)
- 68 g garlic (3%)
- 23 g fresh ginger (1%)
- 11 g cumin seed (0.5%)
- 7 g turmeric (0.3%)
- 114 g cane or coconut vinegar (5%)
- 11 g sugar (0.5%), optional
- 32–35 mm natural hog casing, about 4 m (13 ft)
- Cotton string
Directions
Key ingredients
- In the collection: Turmeric in the fresh paste; the vindaloo-style alternative to bottle masala is close to Vindaloo Paste (Vinha d’Alhos). If you cannot buy bottle masala, Garam Masala is the wrong blend but the nearest shelf item; add an extra 1% chilli with it.
- Make the paste: soak the chillies in the vinegar 30 minutes, then grind with garlic, ginger, cumin and turmeric to a smooth paste. Stir in the bottle masala.
- Grind: chill the pork to 0 °C / 32 °F and grind through an 8 mm (5/16 in) plate, skin and all; or cut it into 6 mm cubes for the older hand-cut texture. Skin adds body.
- Mix and marinate: mix pork with salt and Cure #1, then the paste and sugar, until sticky and evenly red. Cover and refrigerate overnight.
- Taste: fry a spoonful. Hot, sour and deeply spiced, salt clearly present. Adjust before stuffing.
- Stuff and tie: stuff firmly and tie links of 10–15 cm (4–6 in) with string.
- Dry: hang in a cool, airy place out of the sun — 12–15 °C / 54–59 °F, or on a rack in the fridge with a fan — for 3–4 days, until the skins are dry and the links have lost about 10–15% of their weight. Family recipes hang them 3–4 days and say they keep for months; refrigerate or freeze them afterwards all the same.
- Cook: simmer the links 10 minutes in a little water, then slice or squeeze out the meat and fry with onions and boiled potatoes until browned and 71 °C / 160 °F. Serve with pav, or cooked into a sausage pulao.
- Sibling recipe: Goan Chouriço (Goa Sausage) — the Goan cousin, cubed, pressed, pickled harder and dried longer.
Notes
Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t. Built from East Indian community recipes. One family version grinds pork shoulder with its skin, mixes it with a paste of Kashmiri chillies, garlic, turmeric, cumin and vinegar, stuffs it into pork casing, ties 4–6 inch links and hangs them away from the sun for 3–4 days; others build the same sausage on bottle masala. Deviations: (1) both are used here — bottle masala for the toasted depth, a fresh chilli-garlic-vinegar paste for the bite; (2) Cure #1 at 156 ppm, which family recipes do not use; (3) a controlled dry, then refrigeration, instead of open storage for months. Untested.
Where East Indian pork sausage came from. The Portuguese held the Bombay islands, Salsette and Bassein from the sixteenth century until the Marathas took Bassein in 1739 and the islands passed to the British. Catholic communities on that coast kept Portuguese-influenced cooking, including vinegar-and-pork dishes — sorpotel, vindaloo — and sausages. In the late nineteenth century (usually dated to Queen Victoria’s 1887 jubilee), community leaders adopted the name ‘East Indian’ to mark themselves as Bombay’s original Catholics. The sausage’s own history is recorded only in community and family recipe writing; no dated source has been found.
Bottle masala. A dry-roasted blend made by East Indian families once a year, usually in the hot season, from twenty to thirty-odd spices — several kinds of chilli, coriander, cumin, turmeric, mustard, fenugreek, sesame, poppy seed, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, nutmeg, mace, star anise, bay leaf and others — pounded and stored in bottles, which gives it the name. Each family’s blend differs.
Variations. Ground or hand-cut; with or without skin; bottle-masala or vindaloo-paste; some add a little ginger or sugar; some smoke them.
Sourcing and gear. Bottle masala is sold by East Indian makers in Mumbai and by Indian online grocers; check that it is the East Indian blend, not a generic ‘Bombay masala’. Kashmiri chillies are in Indian groceries.
Still open. No published history of the East Indian sausage; no scientific data on its traditional keeping properties.
The photo. No open-licensed photograph of East Indian sausage exists; the photograph shows Goan sausage frying, its nearest neighbour.
Read more on the site. India and Goa