A Taste Of The Tropics, Preserved In Perad
By Lavina Dsouza
Even though it has very little to do with cheese, guava cheese is a beloved part of the Goan festive platter. Photo courtesy: Getty Images
Like many South Asians, I grew up in a joint family. My maternal grandmother, whom we called Mai, distributed daily household chores among the family members. However, the garden was hers and Mama’s (or my maternal uncle’s) responsibility. Mai had asthma and couldn’t walk long distances. But the garden was her haven. She was the happiest taking a walk here and checking for new buds, while ensuring that Suzie, our Alsatian pup, didn’t make her trip.
Our garden, located in the backyard of our home in Pune, was lush and provided many of the ingredients we used in the kitchen. Even though Mai didn’t particularly like the monsoon due to her asthma, come July, she would excitedly look forward to the guava tree being in full bloom. This meant that after all the guavas had been harvested, a lion’s share would get converted to perad.
Consuming all the fruit was nearly impossible, even after sharing some of it with friends and neighbours. So Mai would religiously store all the fruit in a huge sack in the kitchen and allow them to ripen.
For as long as I can remember, the day Mai announced that it was time to make perad would be the happiest for me, because I knew we would have an enormous stash of sweets that I could dip into anytime.
Perad, also known as guava cheese in many regions worldwide, is a gelatinous, reddish-brown Goan confectionery. It is made of guava pulp, sugar, a little lime juice, and butter. It may seem that perad is simple to make, especially for those who have access to fresh guavas and the other commonly available ingredients. However, it is anything but an easy process.
Making perad at home meant everyone had to pitch in and help, which would draw huge sighs from my family. But we also knew that if we wanted to have any perad that year, it would entail making it from scratch. The only other option was planning a trip to Goa to buy it readymade off the stands. The latter was an expensive option, so the entire household would put some time aside on the designated day, when Mai would pay a visit to the garden one last time before beginning the preparations for perad.
Every year, we would collect approximately 5 kgs of guavas to make perad. In addition, we would need 2.5 kgs of sugar, juice from about two lemons, and four tablespoons of butter or ghee. Mai would wake up at dawn and ask Mama to get the logs, bricks, dried coconut leaves and husks to make a hearth.
While he got busy doing that, Mai would start boiling the guavas in batches and putting them out to cool. She would then laboriously sieve out the seeds using a strainer to make sure that the pulp was extracted, and then mash the guava pieces together with the pulp to make a smooth paste. Once the hearth was ready, Mai placed this paste in a large vat. She would add sugar to the pulp, and each of the family members took turns to stir the mixture, to make sure it did not stick to the bottom. When it started to bubble and hiss, she would add the lime juice—which acted as the setting agent—and butter or ghee. The stirring continued for a few hours until the fragrant mixture started to leave the sides of the vat.
At this point, my mum would bring out the thalis or stainless steel plates and generously butter the surface of the plates and her hands. Chunks of gelatinous perad would be dolloped onto each thali. Using our hands, we would spread the hot mass out as evenly as possible and let it rest till it was completely cool. The perad or guava cheese was then cut into diamond-shaped pieces, and we all gobbled up a few pieces before storing the rest away.
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Guava cheese is known by different names, but it is beloved to many communities around the world. Photo courtesy: Getty Images
A few years later, Mai passed away, and the mere thought of making perad started to stress everyone out. So we began giving away the guavas to neighbours. Eventually, we sold that home, and I got married and moved to London. Asian stores here were still catching up with ingredients from regions other than Punjab and Pakistan. The essential components to make perad were still inaccessible. You would be lucky to get your hands on a single guava, let alone a kilo, in the U.K.
For a couple of years, I stomped all my cravings and asked my folks to send me a packet or two of perad if they ever visited Goa and happened to buy some. Around this time, I decided to use Facebook to try my luck at finding friends who would be happy to ship some to me directly from Goa. In the process, I struck gold when I came across groups of home cooks making guava cheese around the world!
I was surprised to find that most of these home cooks were not Goan by heritage. As it turned out, guava cheese, just like many other dishes, was brought to Goa by the Portuguese. However, you can also find it in places like Jamaica, Guyana, Brazil, and even the United States, where it is called “guayabate”.
While the guava is thought to be indigenous to India and most Caribbean countries, there's conflicting evidence on where it originated. According to Alan Davidson, author of The Oxford Companion to Food, guavas were first discovered in Peru around 800 BC, from where they made their way to Mexico and the Caribbean islands. Research by Purdue University proposes that guavas originated in Southern Mexico and Central America and then travelled to South America and the Caribbean along with colonisers. However, the Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions To The World maintains that Indigenous people in America cultivated guavas about 2000 years ago.
According to Miguel De Braganza, a horticultural consultant who served with Goa’s Directorate of Agriculture for 15 years, the Coloquios dos Simples e Drogas, an extensive compilation of trees and medicinal plants in Goa published in 1563 AD does not include any mention of the guava.
“Yet, by 1590 AD, guava was being served as a mango substitute [called amrud in Hindi, while aam refers to mangoes] on royal Mughal tables in Delhi,” he said. “So, we can deduce that the fruit was probably introduced in India between 1560 and 1590 AD., before the arrival of the East India Company, as is also mentioned by José E. Mendes Ferrao in The Adventure of Plants and the Portuguese Discoveries (1993)."
Irrespective of how guavas came to be ubiquitous around the world, it is clear that colonists played a part in making this happen. Davidson states that European colonists like the Portuguese and Spaniards found the guava or guayavu in Haiti. The Spaniards started growing guavas commercially in the West Indies as early as 1526. However, as guavas tended to ripen quickly, they carried the seeds over to their colonies in the East Indies and Guam rather than Europe.
By the 17th century, the guava had made its way to India and most of Southeast Asia with the Portuguese. However, it was already well settled by then in Cuba, most Caribbean countries, and the Americas due to the Spaniards, who had arrived in Florida in the 1500s.
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West Indians had started stewing guava shells since the late 1500s, while enslaved people working in Cuban sugar mills had started making pastelitos from guava paste to serve as a side dish. Pastelitos, or “little pastries” in Spanish, are super crisp and flaky pastries glazed with thick syrup and always stuffed with sweet or savoury fillings. Over the years, Cuban pastelitos have become synonymous with cream cheese and guava fillings.
The aftermath of the Spanish–American War in 1898 and the influence of the U.S. on the island introduced Cubans to cream cheese. During the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro between 1953-1959, a huge number of Cubans arrived in Miami, bringing pastelitos to the city along with numerous local cream cheese bakes. In the process, guava cheese pastelitos were born. Guava paste without thickening agents also became a popular addition to ice creams and milkshakes. Miami had truly embraced this fruit.
In places like Jamaica, guava took on new avatars like guava jerk sauce and became a prime ingredient in barbeque sauces. In Brazil, guava paste or goaibada was eaten with a soft cheese called queijo mineiro, and the combination was called Romeo and Juliet.
Yet, the origins of guava cheese remain a mystery.
One theory states that Caelius Apicius, one of the earliest documented cookbook authors, had a Roman recipe for stewing quinces with honey and vinegar in his book De Re Coquinaria. Using this recipe, European nuns made marmelada or "quince preparation”. When these nuns found guavas amongst the Indigenous population in America in the 16th century, they swapped the quinces with guavas, thus creating guava cheese.
While people around the globe have experimented with guava cheese, it remains a humble family tradition in Goa. People only make it once or twice a year, and the only way to differentiate between the perad made in different households is by how smooth or chewy it turns out.
However, there are a few local variations of the dish in regional Indian cuisines. Hindus in Goa started calling it perancho alvo, and East Indians and Bengalis picked it up too. In West Bengal, the dish metamorphosed into a ripe guava halua made by mashing the fruit in ghee along with cloves, cinnamon, milk and sugar.
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Irrespective of what it was called or who ate it, the recipe for guava cheese remained the same: equal parts guava pulp and sugar with a thickening agent and some ghee or butter.
Even though the recipe isn’t too complicated, surprisingly, not many factories mass produce guava cheese. You can occasionally find a few home cooks selling a small number of perad packets in the heart of Goa's Margao market. But once the batch is sold, you are unlikely to find any off the shelf until a new season of guavas is around the corner. Even companies like Costas, who specialise in selling Goan products and desserts like dodol and choris, don't sell packets of perad. So finding homemade perad is relatively rare.
Hence, the presence of perad on the Goan kuswar platter was intentional. It signified that a lot of energy had gone into its making, and the whole household had come together to stir this sticky concoction for hours.
Odette Mascarenhas, a culinary art historian and the author of the cookbook, The Culinary Heritage of Goa, shares that the kuswar or Portuguese consoada is a term used for sweets that are a part of the Goan repertoire.
The word consoada stems from the Latin word consolata (or comforted). In the earlier days, the tradition among the descendants of Portuguese settlers in Goa was to spend the day before Christmas in prayer and fasting after midnight mass, which was known as Missa do Galo' (or Mass of the Rooster) in Portugal. After mass, the congregation would eat a light meal of bacalhau (or salted cod), potatoes, egg, cabbage and a bean salad with dressings of olive oil, vinegar, and finely chopped garlic.
“Desserts like pasteis de Santa Clara, laranjinhas de China, teias de Aranha, and popular Goan sweets were served after the Mass,” said Mascarenhas. These sweets included local preparations such as nevryo, doce, bhaat, bolinhas, pinagre, and kulkuls.
“After the meal, the attendees would leave the leftovers as a sign of respect for relatives who had passed away, hoping they would eat them as they waited for the birth of Christ. Over the years, fasting gave way to a festival of celebration, still observed to this day.”
Back home, celebrations meant having a lavish kuswar platter containing dodol, bebinca, neuris, perad, and marzipan, to name a few items. Most sweets on the platter hardly required four or five ingredients, but took hours and hours of effort. Festivals were never confined only to immediate family members. It was about bringing the community together to share the joy. During my first Christmas in London, I fondly remembered all the good times we had during the handful of festivals we celebrated with friends and neighbours. In the U.K., on the other hand, the streets looked spookily empty on Christmas Eve.
A small group of diaspora Goans has kept the perad making tradition alive. Photo courtesy: Getty Images
As people migrated across the globe, the number of items on the platter also dwindled for many families. Making items such as perad or dodol was an almost formidable task. However, Goan home cooks worldwide have taken it in their stride to ensure the diaspora doesn’t miss out on its share of perad. They make small batches and source ingredients from the closest possible tropical location.
Valleena Machado, who lives in Adelaide, South Australia, found it challenging to make perad during Christmas as guavas were expensive. So she started using tinned guavas and making fresh perad when the fruit was readily available, closer to Easter. She was overwhelmed by the response and said it has been fulfilling to serve the community, bringing back happy memories from her childhood.
Kaushal Karkhanis, who has tasted perad in Goa and goiabada in Brazil, found the Brazilian version, paired with queijo mineiro, fascinating.
"The tangy sweetness of guava blending brilliantly with the salty and milky texture of the cheese was an explosion of flavours," says Karkhanis.
He adds befittingly: “It is enchanting to see how people unknown to each other, located hundreds of miles away, share the same traditions yet can be completely unaware of it at times.”
