BharatSangraha

Bhojpur & Purvanchal · Middle & Lower Gangetic Plain

Foodways

A portable foodway, and the portability is the point. Sattu needs no fire; litti is baked in embers with no vessel; chura keeps for months; achar carries its own preservative. This is the kitchen of a region whose men have been leaving to work for two hundred years, and much of what it makes is designed to travel a week in a cloth bundle. Over that base sits Banaras — a temple-and-pilgrim city with an entirely separate register of sweets, chaat, thandai and winter milk foam that exists only where a large idle crowd needs feeding.

Primary cooking medium

Mustard oil, dominant and often used rawGhee for litti, festival food and the Banaras sweet tradeTil oil in winter

Dominant sour agents

Amchur and dried mangoLemon and kagzi limeTamarindCurdPickle masala used as a seasoning in its own right

Spice register

Panch phoran in mustard oil, with ajwain, whole dried chilli, and a heavy pickle-masala register. Raw mustard oil, raw onion and green chilli are added at the table. Banaras cooks with a hing-and-ginger base and no onion or garlic in its temple-facing kitchens, which is why the city's most famous savoury food is a kachori and a potato curry rather than anything with meat in it.

Staple grains and carbs

Rice, including the aromatic Kalanamak landrace of the Gorakhpur beltWheatChana, and the sattu made from itChura and laiMarua and other millets on the southern edge

Preservation methods

Sattu, which keeps for months and needs no cookingChura and parched riceMango, lemon and chilli achar in mustard oilBadi and tilauri, sun-driedTil and gur sweets made through the winter

Signature techniques

Ember baking of litti

Wheat dough balls stuffed with sattu, ajwain and pickle masala, baked directly in cow-dung-cake or wood embers, then cracked and dipped in ghee. No vessel, no oil, no fuel beyond what is already burning — a food for people on the move, which is how it got here and why it stayed.

Also found in: Magadh, Marwar & the Thar

Sand roasting for sattu and bhuja

Gram, rice and maize roasted in hot sand in an iron pan and sieved out. Ground it becomes sattu, which is drunk, stuffed and eaten dry, and which the indenture ships carried.

Also found in: Magadh, Mithilanchal

Ahuna and handi meat

Mutton, mustard oil, garlic and whole spice sealed into an earthen handi with dough and cooked slowly over dung-cake fire, the pot broken or unsealed at the table. The Champaran version has spread across eastern India in the last twenty years.

Also found in: Magadh

Dew-set malaiyo

Milk whipped to a foam and left under winter dew overnight, skimmed at dawn and sold within hours. Banaras makes it from November to February and calls it malaiyo; Lucknow calls the same thing nimish.

Also found in: Awadh, Antarved Doab

Zari and kadhua brocade weaving

Not a food technique but the region's other great slow process — silk woven with gold-wrapped thread on a pit loom, with the kadhua method working each motif with a separate needle so no float runs behind the cloth. A single sari can take months.

Also found in: Anga & Seemanchal

The foodway signature of Bhojpur & Purvanchal — cooking medium, souring agents, spice register, staple grains and the techniques that define it. (5)