इस क्षेत्र का अनुवाद अभी इस भाषा में नहीं हुआ है, इसलिए यह अंग्रेज़ी में दिखाया जा रहा है।
Bagelkhand · Central Highlands & Forest Belt
A plateau kitchen and a forest kitchen sitting side by side. On the plateau — Rewa, Satna, Maihar — the meal is rice, arhar dal, a vegetable and a chutney, with wheat roti at night and a strong Bundeli inheritance in the west. In the forest districts it is kodo or kutki, wild greens, mahua and whatever the river and the season give. The temple towns run a third kitchen entirely, feeding tens of thousands of pilgrims a day on fixed vegetarian menus.
Rice and pigeon-pea dal, eaten twice a day where the household can afford it. The dal is thin and soured with tamarind or amchur rather than tomato, and finished with a mustard-seed and garlic tempering poured on at the table.
Brinjal buried in embers until the skin chars, then peeled and mashed with raw mustard oil, onion, garlic and green chilli. Cooked in the ash of a dung or wood fire rather than over a flame — the smoke is the seasoning, and it is the single most-eaten cooked vegetable in the region.
A festive gram-flour dish of the Bagheli kitchen: the flour is cooked down with water or buttermilk into a thick paste, set, cut into pieces and finished in a spiced gravy. It belongs to the same technique family as Bundeli rikwanch and Rajasthani gatta — three regional answers to making a flour with no gluten behave like a solid.
Soaked chana dal ground coarse, seasoned with garlic, chilli and coriander, shaped and steamed rather than fried. Steaming rather than frying is what distinguishes it from a pakora, and it keeps for a day.
Rice-flour puris, made by scalding the flour before kneading. Fried for weddings and for the Karma and Diwali seasons, and unknown west of the Bundeli line.
Little millet and kodo boiled like rice, eaten with dal, buttermilk or a chutney of chilli and salt. Everyday food across the forest villages of Sidhi, Shahdol and Umaria, and increasingly sold as a premium grain in cities to people who have never eaten it as a staple.
Koilar (Bauhinia) buds, chench, munga leaf, bathua and a long list of seasonal bhaji, boiled and tempered simply. Gathered rather than bought, they carry households through the pre-monsoon weeks when nothing has been harvested and stores are low.
Dried mahua boiled back and worked into flour, or ground with til and jaggery into a dense ball. Sweet without sugar, filling, and eaten in the months when a household is buying nothing.
Rohu, catla, singhi and small local species from the Son and the plateau rivers, cooked plainly with mustard oil, garlic and chilli, or salted and dried. River fish is the region's main non-vegetarian protein; goat appears at weddings and at Adivasi festivals rather than weekly.
Sour gram-flour kadhi over rice, and the set-and-cut besan rolls of the Bundeli border districts. Both are strongest in the west and thin out towards Sidhi — a clean gradient you can eat your way along.
A Rewa landrace with a distinct scent and a small, firm fruit, grown in a limited belt around Govindgarh. It received a geographical indication in 2023 and has since been exported commercially. Unripe fruit goes to amchur and to pickle; almost nothing is wasted.
A thin sour stew of mixed vegetables soured with tamarind or kaith and finished with mustard oil — the eastern counterpart of a kadhi, made without dairy, and standard in the Son valley.
Cracked wheat roasted in ghee and cooked with jaggery, or rice cooked down in milk and jaggery. Made for births, housewarmings and after funerals; sugar-based sweets are town food here and jaggery-based ones are village food.
Fried wheat-flour diamonds coated in jaggery syrup, and sesame bound with gud. Both are made in quantity before winter and both keep for weeks without refrigeration, which is the entire design brief.
मुख्य आहार
मिठाइयाँ
स्ट्रीट फ़ूड
पेय
Bagelkhand का खानपान — ख़ास व्यंजन, मुख्य आहार, मिठाइयाँ, स्ट्रीट फ़ूड और उन्हें कहाँ चखें। (14)