James Ferreira Makes an East Indian Moile

At Goya, celebrating home cooks and recipes have always been at the heart of our work. Through our series, #1000Kitchens, we document recipes from kitchens across the country, building a living library of heirloom recipes that have been in the family for 3 generations or more. In this edition, Sneha Mehta meets fashion designer James Ferreira at his home in Khotachiwadi, Mumbai, where he shares his creative twist on the classic East Indian chicken moile.

This season’s stories are produced in partnership with the Samagata Foundation—a non-profit that champions meaningful projects.

In the first instalment of Amitav Ghosh's popular Ibis Trilogy, Sea of Poppies, a character named Captain Da Silva turns to the repurposed slave ship’s cramped galley to prepare a meal. In the novel, the ship Ibis is in the midst of a long, arduous voyage from India to China, with a motley crew of exiles, indentured laborers and rebels aboard. And what does Captain Da Silva, an East Indian from Vasai, a northern suburb of Mumbai, cook for his crew to offer them comfort and a reprieve from the uncertainties of the harsh journey? Chicken moile.

Like Captain Da Silva, James Ferreira is East Indian. As a big fan of contemporary Indian literature, the 68-year-old fashion designer was moved by this mention of his community, whose population is rapidly dwindling, which is rarely mentioned in popular media, and whose food is not easily found in restaurants. Moreover, the mention of moile, a classic East Indian dish and a festive fixture at weddings and celebrations, was a thrilling reminder of his childhood growing up in Khotachiwadi, one of the few remaining East Indian enclaves in Mumbai, with seven siblings. “My mum would make moile for special occasions,” he said. “And with so many kids, we had a party every second week!”

Moile uses the building blocks of many East Indian dishes—onion, garlic, ginger and green chillies —traditionally as a base for duck, but often with chicken or mutton, and bottle masala, the proprietary spice blend that is the pride and joy of every East Indian family, making it a quintessential representation of the community’s cuisine at large. It is no surprise, then, that moile found its way into Ghosh’s meticulously researched novel and is the recipe Ferreira chose to share with us, albeit using aubergine instead of meat—his contemporary, creative twist on a classic which we soon recognized as his signature move.

Ferreira is something of a custodian of East Indian culture, particularly of his family’s 200-year-old Portuguese-style townhouse, and president of the Khotachiwadi Heritage Trust. His family are descendants of people indigenous to the North Konkan region of Bombay, Bassein (now known as Vasai) and Salsette (parts of present-day Thane) who were converted to Catholicism by the Portuguese in the 16th century. The term “East Indian” was coined by the British, as a reference to the East India Company, and as a way to distinguish this community from other Indian Christians. East Indian cuisine and culture has heavy Portuguese, British and local Maharashtrian influences.

We find Ferreira at the back of the house (this ‘new’ extension of the building was built in 1920), seated at a white lace tablecloth-covered table, surrounded by antique furniture, a framed cross-stitch rendition of his family tree and the century-old floor plans of the home, vintage lamps, and art depicting diverse motifs ranging from Ganesha to black and white family photos, the Last Supper to Princess Diana. It's like walking into a pristinely preserved house museum—Ferreira’s staff regularly sends away people who peek in assuming it is an art gallery—and there is a staggering number of captivating objects everywhere you turn. “I like to live surrounded by beauty,” he explained simply.

But as the curator of this home, Ferreira keeps it relevant by opening it up to guests as a boutique homestay, hosting art exhibitions and pop-ups, and his sit-down dinners. “My father was famous for throwing themed parties. Some popular ones include a Shipwreck party, where we covered the floor in sand and served seafood, and a Back-to-Front party where dessert was served first, and guests wore their clothes backward. So I enjoy hosting, but I hate going out,” he said, with a cheeky grin.

Moile is a wet masala that can be made in advance and stored, because the vinegar in the recipe acts as a preservative. The aubergine moile was devised for Ferreira’s dinner parties—a vegetarian option in a cuisine that doesn’t inherently have too many. “Usually, East Indians serve their food buffet style, like Maharashtrians. I’ve started making it into courses for the dinners,” he said. Ferreira’s meal starts with a spinach, pear, cranberry, and caramelised walnut salad with a honey mustard dressing (he makes the mustard himself), followed by the aubergine moile served with chittiappes, a decadent cross between a pancake and an appam. While his father’s hosting skills and his family legacy as the caterers for the Peninsula Line, the first railway line in India, are a part of his flair, it is his mother Thelma’s influence that comes through most strongly in the food, especially because Ferreira refers to a hand-written recipe book that his mother made, documenting their family recipes that go back generations. The book has inbuilt tabs for sauces, meat, drinks, dessert, and pages and pages of his mother’s beautiful cursive writing—and in the age of ephemeral digital fragments it is nothing short of a priceless heirloom.

“One of my fondest memories is of [my mother] sitting at a table at the back of the house in front of the bay window writing these recipe books for each of her eight children. She did it very diligently. There are no mistakes in it,” he said fondly.

Cooking with Ferreira involves diverse cooking tools (he uses a kitchen weighing scale that looks several decades old and gleaming new Japanese knives), a stream of stories about the wild parties he used to throw, his work as a costume designer for Bollywood films or neighborhood gossip, and regular utterings of “stupid boy” and “satyanash!” paired with playful eye rolls toward his long-standing staff Pandu, who is wearing a smart safari suit uniform that Ferreira designed, and grins with familiarity each time. The two get together to julienne the onion, garlic, and ginger, deftly building up big piles of translucent aromatics. “The secret to a good moile is how finely you slice everything,” he said.

Dressed in a flowy, floral batik kaftan with his glasses perched on his head, Ferreira is at home in his kitchen as he caramelizes the onions using his mother’s double boiler technique (in a pot placed on a tawa to slowly and evenly distribute the heat), with Pandu’s constantly hovering presence nearby. But despite his warmth and vivacity, he is deadly serious about cooking, just like his mother.

“I started cooking after mummy died. When she was around I wouldn’t dare to make her recipes, or even if I did she was always there to supervise,” he said. “Now I’m very exacting like she was. That’s the way you get the best food: by being a perfectionist.”

Once the aromatics have reduced into a soft fragrant jam, the bottle masala goes in: a blend of spices made with a different, fiercely guarded recipe in every East Indian home. Ferreira’s mother’s family would painstakingly make their bottle masala with 28 hand-roasted, sun-dried, and hand-pounded spices every March, and store it in tinted beer bottles (from which it gets its name) on wooden shelves to preserve its freshness and prevent moisture from seeping in. While that’s slowly cooking away, he gets started on his chittiappes, pouring palm-sized portions of batter into a tiny cast iron egg pan. What emerges is a stack of aerated, pillowy, injera-like bread.

Pandu lays the table elegantly, with vintage J&G Meakin plates, striking cutlery, and crystal cut glasses (“Sab inke mummy ke time ka hai,” he tells me). Ferreira instructs us to fold a serving of moile in a chittiappe, making a kind of taco. The moile is mellow and earthy—the bottle masala and slow cooked aubergine form a meaty, smokey combination—and the chittiappes are soft and sweet from the coconut milk in its batter (the traditional recipe uses fresh toddy!). It feels like we could eat a dozen. “I served moile to Amitav Ghosh in my home,” he said, with glee. “It turns out he’d never actually tasted it. It was such a wonderful full circle moment.” In the Ferreira home, every dish is served with a story, but none perhaps, as grand as moile.

JAMES FERREIRA’S RECIPE FOR MOILE MASALA

Ingredients

1 kilo baby aubergine
1/2 kilo onions.
70 gm ginger
70 gm garlic
4 medium size green chilies
2 and a 1/2 tbsp bottle masala
2 and a 1/2 tbsp sugarcane vinegar.
Oil to fry

Method

Cut the aubergine into slices and add salt. Keep aside. Cut onion into very fine slices. Slice ginger and garlic into strips as thin as possible. Slit chilies into 4 pieces.
Fry onion in oil on your lowest flame. Allow the onions to first turn pink till a sweet aroma is released. Continue cooking till the onions brown.
Then add the garlic and ginger to the onions and continue frying on a low flame till the garlic turns brown, too. At this point, add the bottle masala and vinegar till they integrate into the mixture well. Add salt to season the wet masala and keep aside.
Wash the salted aubergine slices and pat dry. Fry the aubergine in a vessel till brown and then add the moile masala.

RECIPE FOR CHITTIAPPE

Ingredients

1/2 kilo rice flour
1/4 kilo wheat flour
2 eggs
2 x 200ml packets coconut milk
100 grams castor sugar
2 tablespoons dry yeast mixed in warm water till you get a smooth mixture
Salt to taste

Method

Mix both the flours in a glass bowl and keep aside.
Beat the two eggs in a separate container, add the coconut milk, sugar, yeast mixture, and salt.
Mix well and then add to the flour mixture. Mix well until you get a smooth mixture of pouring consistency.
Cover the container with cloth and store in fridge overnight (at least 12 hours). Stir the pancake mixture till smooth. With a large spoon pour it into the oiled and heated fry pan.
Keep your flame low and fry till firm. Flip over and fry again.

Heat your aubergine moile before plating. Put the mixture onto a pancake and fold over.
Place 2 on a plate with the tossed and dressed salad. Serve hot.

Words by Sneha Mehta, images by Nachiket Pimprikar, illustration by Shawn D'souza.
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