Chorise connections

Every culture that makes sausage has some variation of a sausage rice. In Goa, chorise rice a pulao, really) packs flavour and history

- VIR SANGHVI

Wherever you find rice, you will usually also find a sausage and rice dish. In the Far East, where rice is the staple, it is common to fry it with slices of slightly sweet Chinese sausage. In North Africa, the Merguez lamb sausage goes into rice dishes. In the US they have jambalaya. And In Italy, spicy fresh sausage adds flavour to risotto. 

But the home of the rice-and-sausage combination is the Iberian Peninsula. The Arabs took rice to Spain, Portugal and other European countries including Italy, where it found fame in such dishes as risotto and paella.

We can date the invention of the chorizo sausage, Spain’s greatest gastronomic gift to theworld, because it usespimentón, a powdered dried chilli that is often smoked. So we know that it must be after 1502, the date of Christopher Colombus’s last voyage to South America where he found chillis.

At around the same time that Columbus was arriving in a country he mistakenly thought was India, Vasco Da Gama was dropping anchor in the real India. The Portuguese came as traders, tried setting up an empire here and were finally restricted to Goa. Many of the food items they introduced still remain popular there: vinegar, bread, chillies, cashew nuts and the chorizo.