Barak Valley · Eastern Himalaya & Brahmaputra Belt
Three kitchens share the plain and do not merge. The Bengali Hindu household kitchen, fish-centred and with a strong shutki tradition; the Bengali Muslim kitchen, which keeps beef with satkora and the akhni rice at the centre of a feast; and the Manipuri kitchens of the Cachar settlements, which cook to a different sour and a different fermented fish altogether. The tea gardens added a fourth register — the Adivasi labour communities brought from central India in the nineteenth century cook their own foodway inside the estates.
Dried fish roasted over a flame until it crumbles, then mashed with raw mustard oil, shallot, garlic and roasted chilli. Eaten in small quantities with a large quantity of rice. It is the dish outsiders are warned about and the one the valley is most attached to.
Dried fish rehydrated and slow-fried down with onion, garlic, turmeric and chilli until the oil separates, often with aubergine, radish or bamboo shoot carrying the flavour. Cooked long enough that the fish stops being a piece of fish and becomes a texture in the gravy.
Beef or mutton braised with onion and whole spice, with thick slices of satkora rind dropped in near the end. The rind is aromatic and faintly bitter and cuts the fat, and it is the single most identifiable Sylheti–Barak dish anywhere it appears.
The Sylheti rice-and-meat dish — rice cooked in the stock and fat of the meat with whole spice, drier and less layered than a biryani and cooked in one pot rather than assembled. Standard at weddings and at Eid.
Fermented fish paste ground on a stone with dried chilli, coriander leaf and mustard oil, sometimes worked into a fire-roasted aubergine. A pinch is enough for a meal.
Fish head cooked down with rice or with lentils. Two versions of the same principle — the head is the valued part of the fish, and it is used to flavour a starch rather than eaten as a portion.
Taro stolons, which grow along every waterlogged margin here, cooked with small river prawns and mustard. A monsoon dish, and one of the few that treats a weed as a crop.
Fresh or brine-kept bamboo shoot cooked with river fish and green chilli. Comes into the Bengali kitchen from the hill rims of the valley and is now unremarkable in it.
Sticky rice packed into a green bamboo tube and roasted at the edge of a fire until the tube chars and the rice takes its scent. Sold at winter fairs and made at home for Bihu and for weddings.
Two of the standard winter pithas — a filled rice-flour roll, and a thin crepe wrapped around coconut and date-palm gur. The gur is the seasonal ingredient and its quality is argued about.
The Manipuri dish of the Cachar settlements — boiled vegetables mashed with ngari, chilli and herbs, with no oil at all. Set beside a Bengali bhorta it shows the two communities using the same gesture on different ingredients.
A clear Manipuri vegetable stew seasoned with ngari and maroi herb, boiled rather than fried. The valley's lightest cooked dish, and the clearest contrast with the mustard-oil register around it.
Alkali extracted from banana-peel ash, cooked with papaya or pulses. It arrives in the valley from the Brahmaputra side and is a minority dish here, where the Assamese plain treats it as the opening of every meal.
Rice pudding made with the winter's first date-palm gur, which is available for a few weeks only and collapses in flavour if it is stored.
The labour-line kitchen of the estates — rice, a thin chilli-and-mustard jhol, foraged greens, and pork or dried fish when there is money. It is a central Indian foodway kept alive in Assam by the communities brought here to pick tea.
Staples
Sweets
Street food
Drinks
The food of Barak Valley — signature dishes, staples, sweets, street food and where to eat them. (15)