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Kumaon · Western Himalaya & Trans-Himalaya

खानपान पद्धति

The Kumaoni kitchen is drier and more pounded than the Garhwali one across the watershed. Both grow the same millets and the same pulses, but Kumaon leans on black soybean where Garhwal leans on black gram, cooks more of its pulses down to a thick chudkani or a ground dubke rather than to a pourable dal, and puts a pounded salt chutney on the side of almost everything. The other constant is the vessel — the bhaddu, a heavy lidded bronze pot in which rajma and pulses are cooked slowly over embers, and which is credited locally with a flavour no pressure cooker reproduces.

मुख्य पाक माध्यम

Mustard oil, pressed in village ghanis and now mostly bought inGhee, eaten ceremonially at Ghee Sankranti and used sparingly otherwiseBhang (hemp) seed, ground for its own oil into chutney and pisyun loonChyura — Indian butter tree fat from the lower valleys of Pithoragarh, solid at room temperature and used where dairy fat is short

प्रमुख खट्टे तत्व

Buttermilk, the base of jholi and the daily cooking liquidGalgal, the coarse hill citrus, and lemonTimur, the numbing Himalayan prickly ash used in chutneyAmchur and dried apricot in the high valleysTamarind only where the plains kitchen has come up the road

मसाले की पहचान

Seed-led and deliberately narrow — jakhiya, coriander seed, turmeric, cumin, a fierce small local red chilli and a great deal of garlic pounded raw. Kumaon uses more asafoetida and more coriander seed than Garhwal and almost no whole garam masala outside meat cookery. Against Kangra or Kullu it uses far less dairy, and against the Bhotiya valleys above it, far less salt-butter tea.

मुख्य अनाज

Mandua — finger millet, the winter staple, made into roti with boiling-water doughJhangora — barnyard millet, for kheer and for the year the rain failsRice on irrigated valley-bottom terraces, called talaunWheat on the better upland terraces and throughout the bhabarBuckwheat, barley and amaranth above 2,500 mBhatt and gahat treated as grain rather than as garnish, and eaten daily

संरक्षण की विधियाँ

Sun-drying on slate roofs — colocasia leaf, radish, gourd, greens and whole pulsesPisyun loon, salt pounded with herbs, which keeps for months and seasons anythingFresh butter clarified to ghee, and buttermilk soured deliberately for jholiPickles of lingda fern, timur, galgal and green chilli in mustard oilSeed grain, chilli and gourd hung in baskets in the hearth smoke through the monsoon

विशिष्ट पाक विधियाँ

Bhatt roasting and grinding

Black soybean is dry-roasted in an iron kadhai until it splits, then either cracked coarse and simmered with a flour slurry into chudkani, or soaked, ground wet on a stone and cooked into dubke. Roasted first and ground second is the sequence that makes a pulse taste of smoke rather than of pulse, and it is the Kumaoni signature.

यह भी यहाँ मिलती है: Garhwal

Pisyun loon, the pounded salt

Salt is pounded on a silbatta with garlic, green chilli, turmeric, hemp seed or coriander until it turns into a dense, oily paste. It works as condiment, preservative and portable seasoning at once, keeps for weeks and travels in a leaf packet, and it is the reason a Kumaoni field lunch needs nothing else.

यह भी यहाँ मिलती है: Garhwal

Bhaddu slow-cooking

A lidded, narrow-mouthed bronze or brass pot buried in embers, in which rajma, gahat and bhatt cook for hours with almost no water loss. The metal and the shape do the work a pressure cooker does with force, and the difference is audible in how the household talks about the two.

यह भी यहाँ मिलती है: Garhwal, Kullu & Mandi

Gharat milling

Water-driven horizontal-wheel mills on diverted channels, grinding cold and slow. Finger millet flour goes rancid fast and gharat flour is held to keep longer and taste sweeter; the miller was paid in a measured share of the grain, so no cash entered the transaction.

यह भी यहाँ मिलती है: Garhwal, Kullu & Mandi, Kangra & Dhauladhar

Malu-leaf setting

Sweetened khoya is packed into a cone rolled from a fresh leaf of malu, the wild bauhinia creeper, and left to cool and set in it. The leaf perfumes the sweet and is also the wrapper, the plate and the disposal. Singori is the result, and it cannot be made outside the leaf's range.

यह भी यहाँ मिलती है: Garhwal

High-altitude drying and hearth-smoking

Above 1,500 m thin dry air and hard ultraviolet dry vegetables hard within days, and what cannot be sun-dried is hung above the hearth to take smoke through the monsoon. In the Bhotiya valleys meat and cheese are dried in the cold air the same way, on the Tibetan model rather than the Indian one.

यह भी यहाँ मिलती है: Garhwal, Ladakh & Zanskar, Kinnaur & Spiti

Kumaon की खानपान पहचान — पाक माध्यम, खट्टे तत्व, मसाले, मुख्य अनाज और वे विधियाँ जो इसे परिभाषित करती हैं। (6)