A MONSOON TIME BIRTHDAY…when it’s raining all around it’s the best time to have a homely biryani birthday party! A few friends got together to celebrate birthday boy Rajan Narayan’s 77th birthday on July 4

By Tara Narayan

IT’S not often that I feel like having a birthday party at home for then all who come will also see the untidy mess in which you live! But this was the hubby’s birthday and he said home, only home; his friends love him for himself and not where he lives. Nothing to say to that but every time it’s birthday time for him I look high and low for a decent bol sans rival for him, the “cake without rivals” (in Portuguese you pronounce it “bol sa’ rival”). We know Goa is the country’s smallest state and it has a colorful Portuguese colonial history!
Not only did the Portuguese gift the art of baking leavened bread to India but also a glorious confectionary legacy. Goa has some of the finest confectioners and bakers and they put out a fantabulous spread of bakery produce for daily consumption — from various bread loaves to designer cakes to pastries to éclairs to fancy confectionary for the many celebrations and festivals of Goa. Everything from birth to christening to marriage to pregnancy to death is celebrated with some baked sweet something or another, beginning with the humble all-Goan sweet bol (made with wholesome wheat flour and dark coconut palm jaggery, a sweet bread bun to savor in small bites).
BUT to stay with the hubby’s birthdays for years on end it was my friend (more the hubby’s friend), the late Chef Fernando of iconic Goan cuisine Nostalgia restaurant down south Goa, who used to send me a most sumptuous bol sans rival – a large rectangular or square cake dressed up in wee salty sweet Amul butter creaminess, packed within with layers of caju mava (or cashew nut crumble)…decorated prettily with red and green candied cherries. Bol sans rival is the celebration cake of upper-crust Goan celebrations. Cake without rivals!
I took a shine to bol sans rival early in my years in Goa when I got quite infatuated with it. Along with other Portuguese time treats such as equally famous bebinca, pasteis da nata, bolinha and some more. Goa’s confectionary is unrivalled in India. The bol sans rival started off as an almond crumble packed bol sans rival in France or Portugal may be but in Goa the lighter almond crumble has been replaced by the heavier caju crumble.

Over the years the late Chef Fernando to his wife Margarida Tavora have made bol sans rival for me; then Hotel Mandovi’s one-time Pattisserie chef Clifford Rozario obliged. Sylvia D’Souza of Sugar Flower (at Patto, Panaji) is a most skillful baker and this year on July 4 it was she did a scrumptious bol sans rival. Sylvia is the best old-timer cake woman I know and she is also very meticulous and professional.
My soft, creamy, delicately crunchy bol sans rival was to live and die for – a real beauty, but instead of the usual candied cherry décor, Sylvia had lined the cake with fresh red cherries. It was a hit bols sans rival and everyone enjoyed it.
Come to remember it, some say the cake actually became famous as a Filipino dessert cake of layered butter cream, meringue and chopped cashews; the story goes that Filipino workers in France learnt it and brought it back to the their home country the Philippines! The bol sans rival has some travelling history with small changes. Enjoy, very rich, on birthdays only!
MAINLY the hubby’s birthday evening was just a small-time chicken biryani party. I told the friends – it’s a last-minute decision and in last-minute decisions the easiest thing to put together is a biryani birthday party. Just chicken biryani and bol sans rival. A friend gifted the hubby with a whole lot of wine bottles although he didn’t come himself – and it turned out to be an agreeable, non-formal rainy evening up to midnight. Wine, chicken biryani, some scrumptiously filled veg and tuna sandwiches and bols sans rival. Not to forget the madeleines (or petite madeleines), but this I will tell you about last of all, they’re the latest craze in confectionary in town even if I say so!

I made a most delicious ginger lemonade but only I drank it (the next day too), and pumpkin soup. Naturally most preferred the flavorful biryani with its generous chicken pieces in the longest basmati rice I’ve ever seen (must be triple-X aged basmati). From where? That’s it, at first I thought I would get the signature Niyaaz biryani from Bambolim branch and then my secretary Heena said, order it from a woman her brother Sayed recommends — namely a fabulous biryani cook Nazim Shaikh of Muslimwada in Panjim – and I was happy to say, okay, you organize it. Expensive but the chicken biryani was real value for money, I relished the biryani savoury rice only the next day for my lunch! Hubby of course is a veg TamBrahm Iyer and would not touch it.
I thought jhat phat biryani birthday get-together party quite simply because who doesn’t love a good biryani? Biryani is one of our favourite national dishes across the length and breadth of India with even shudh vegetarians relishing a vegetable redolent biryani. Think of the savoury caramel roasted potatoes tucked in a biryani of old Calcutta; then there’s Hyderabad’s egg biryani, Lucknowi biryani, Sindhi biryani, the Tamil Dindigul and Ambur biryani, Bhatkali biryani of Karnataka, old Bombay’s Maharashtrian biryani!
Some say it is all Indianized biryani and hardly the original biryani of Persian genes which is more herb-redolent than spice-redolent. An oily and spiced-up biryani would be akin to an adulterated biryani and not biryani at all! Well, whatever. We have a choice of so many biryani versions, rejoice. If I can’t find a real lamb biryani like the way my cousin’ uncle – Navin C Patel’s cook, Rajab hailing from Kashmir — used to make it in Bombay many years gone by…I just don’t eat any lamb biryani any more. That’s my emotional sentimental melodrama of the mind.
THIS is to say if you want to throw a party in a hurry just find a good biryani (most come with an exotic raita alongside) in town. As usual, I over-ordered and there was no place in my fridge for leftover biryani, the quarter-full handi stayed on my kitchen stove the rest of the night and the next morning my girl Friday Heena taught me how to save the biryani from spoiling quickly by heating it dum style! So the leftover biryani was good for lunch the next day too. Now she tells me there’s always someone in a Muslim family who will make the superlative biryani and “kichda”…“Next time I will make the biryani for you!” What’s kichda, she’s going to introduce me to it. There’s no country like India to have an eating holiday!
FINALLY, next birthday party small or big I’m ordering these exquisite scallop-shaped French cakes called “madeleines” from Zion D’Souza of Truffles at Caranzalem in Panjim. They look like dainty dolls and basically a superior sponge cake…look and taste very satisfyingly rich. Not cloyingly sweet either and I told Zion forget the décor of colorful itsy bitsy glitz and glamor atop them. Keep my madeleines simple…so they were kind of perfectly austere with someone’s doing this skillful dainty white flower work on them using what, marzipan?

The madeleines looked terrifically classy like dolls confectionary! French-style madeleines (pronounced “mad-lens”) are absolutely for me. I discovered they keep well in the freezer and one may enjoy them straight out of the freezer in lieu of ice-cream — I ate three in a row the next afternoon and made myself pretty sick over them.
Next birthday party – only madeleines. Maybe lemon madeleines whatever that means, tell you next year this time if I’m alive and kicking. Watch this space. By the way these traditional small cake called madeleines hail from the Lorraine region of northeastern France. They’re described as light rich sponge cakes incorporating fine almond meal in them oftentimes. Enjoy once in a blue moon like birthdays!