Tag Archives: cooling

A refreshing breeze in Goa

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I SHOULD NOT BE TELLING you about a wonderful place in the heart of Panjim in Goa, but I will.

The Clube Vasco da Gama is situated on the first floor of a building beside Panjim’s lovely Municipal Garden. Founded in 1909, it occupied other buildings before it moved to its present site. With a pleasant decor, which evokes times long past, the Clube serves a wide range of drinks and superbly prepared Goan food. Today, we enjoyed baby squids stuffed with minced vegetable and chopped up squid, served in a tasty sauce. We also ate croquettes filled with a mildly spiced prawn purée. In addition, we consumed fried fish served in a very spicy sauce. Everything tasted wonderful, and as we will be in Panjim for several days, we will work our way through the menu.

We first came across the Clube in April 2018, when the weather was almost unbearable: extremely hot and humid. Quite by chance we came across the Clube and decided to enter it. We discovered that it has two small balconies, each overlooking the Gardens. Each of them has a small table with three chairs. All day long, there is a lovely, cooling breeze blowing across these two tables, making them the coolest places to sit in central Panjim (without resorting to finding places with air-conditioning).

It is because there are only two of these wonderfully positioned tables, it is with some trepidation that I am telling you about them. I do not want to turn up at the Clube to find them occupied by those who have just read this!

Coffee by the yard

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Traditionally, South Indian filter coffee is served piping hot in small conical metal breakers. The beakers, which are almost too hot to hold, stand in deep cylindrical metal saucers, as shown in the picture.

To cool the coffee so that it reaches a drinkable temperature, one lifts the hot beaker out of the saucer, and then pours the coffee from the beaker into the saucer from as greater height as you dare. Then, you pour the slightly cooler coffee back into the saucer. The procedure is repeated until the beverage reaches the desired temperature.

The person making the coffee repeatedly scoops the bubbling boiling milk, which is added to the coffee, from its pot on the heat, and then pours it back from a great height. The stream of boiling milk is often quite long.

My late father-in-law, a witty man, referring to the pouring from a height involved in filter coffee making and drinking, used to ask us when we visited a coffee house in Bangalore : “How many yards of coffee do you want?”

Note: 1 yard is a measure of length a little less than 1 metre