Viva damão!

“Last Christmas, I gave you my heart…” goes the popular Wham! song. Come to think of it, don’t we all look forward to Christmas and yet, when it’s Christmas Day, look back, reminiscing?

I remember Christmastime in the early 60s in Daman, before fridges started popping up in our kitchens, when people would start collecting free-range eggs weeks in advance, carefully pencilling in dates on the eggs before storing them under layers of rock salt in Cream Cracker biscuit tins (like they did turtle eggs in June).

Back then, the ovens weren’t electric. They were made of clay—panela de barro—fueled with dried coconut husk, sold by the gunny sack. 

Sugar was ‘controlled’ by the ration-shops, so just like the ants, we too would ingeniously start hoarding sugar, even going to the extent of using the quota on the ration cards of domestic helps, who, did not need sugar, preferring hot toddy to tea.

Damão’s housewives invented Cozy Christmas more than half a century before Cozy became a thing

From around December 10, housewives, in groups of about six, would start gathering in the kitchen of one of their houses every night, after putting the husbands and children to bed, and, with coffee and gossip to keep them going, would make traditional Christmas sweets like boroas, queijadinhos, and bolinhos do coco. 

Coconut and egg yolk are the common ingredients of our Christmas sweets. In Portugal, the wine industry used the whites of eggs in their process (before the advent of synthetic resin) and the residual yolks gave birth to the delicious sweets industry.

But I think no other sweet symbolized the fusion of the erstwhile colonies better than Bolinhos do Porto, which is made of just four ingredients:

🥥 Coconut—India 🇮🇳 

🥚 Egg-yolk—Portugal 🇵🇹 

🍫 Cocoa—Africa 🇦🇴 

🧊 Sugar—the universal ingredient

“But the times, they are a-changing” —Bob Dylan 

Home-made sweets are giving way to off-the-shelf sweets just as caroling’s given way to canned music, and Christmas cards to email and text messenger services.

But have cheer—here’s good tidings! There is one thing that has solidly withstood the test of time, tide, and fad:

It’s the humble Bolo de Sura—a modest cake made of flour, eggs, jaggery, and toddy (for leavening) from which it gets its name (‘Sura’ is toddy in Portuguese). 

In the days of plenty, Bolo de Sura was made for giving away to the poor on Christmas Day. To this day, a slice of this poor-man’s cake adorns every platter of sweet that is exchanged among neighbours and friends, rich and poor.

Just like the Yule Pudding of the English, the Bolo de Sura is Damão’s very own Christmas cake, symbolizing the very spirit of Christmas. 

The Happy-Ever-After Christmas Gift 💝 

When we moved from our rented bungalow (now Regal House) in Damão Pequeno (Small Daman) to E/44, our ancestral house in Praça (Fort Area), we didn’t have neighbours close by, so I kept my mother company in the kitchen.

I’d watch her fingers in fascination as she turned dough to art, manifesting her signature sweets like the Bolinhos do Porto, which she had learned to make from her Portuguese friends—wives of Portuguese officers posted in Damão—who probably substituted grated coconut for shredded almonds.

Instead of gossiping, Mum would reminisce about her own Christmases; her favourite Christmas song—“Adeste Fideles” (“O Come All Ye Faithful”) as a choir girl; and especially, about the blue Christmas card she kept locked in the drawer that held her jewelry. All while I sipped black coffee and got drunk on her stories, imbibing every little detail and committing every ingredient to memory. 

Looking back, Mum had been unconsciously passing on her gift of storytelling to me, Christmas by Christmas. ❤️ 🙏