Brahmaputra Valley · Eastern Himalaya & Brahmaputra Belt
Assamese cooking is deliberately light on oil and spice compared with the rest of India, built on boiling, steaming, fermenting and mashing. A full meal is often framed by two opposites — it opens with khar, an alkali, and closes with tenga, a sour. Bamboo shoot, mustard, fish and the local herbs do the rest.
Not a dish so much as a category. Water is filtered through the ash of sun-dried banana peel to make an alkaline extract, which is then cooked with raw papaya, pulses or fish. It opens the meal and it exists nowhere else in India.
A light sour fish curry soured with tomato, lemon, elephant apple (ou tenga) or thekera. Almost no oil, no chilli powder, and it closes the meal.
Where to try: Any Assamese thali restaurant in Guwahati or Jorhat.
Boiled potato mashed by hand with raw mustard oil, chopped onion, green chilli and coriander. The plainest thing on the plate and often the one people miss most when they leave.
Duck slow-cooked with ash gourd or white gourd and whole spices — a festive dish, especially at Magh Bihu and at Kali Puja.
Pork cooked with fermented bamboo shoot (khorisa) and often bhut jolokia. More associated with the Mising, Bodo and hill communities than with the plains Hindu kitchen.
A category rather than a dish — dozens of leafy greens, many gathered wild, cooked simply with garlic. Households will name and distinguish greens most Indian markets have never sold.
Rice soaked in water overnight so it ferments lightly, eaten the next morning with mustard oil, onion, chilli and pitika. Summer food, and the traditional breakfast on the morning of Bohag Bihu.
A rolled crepe of bora (sticky) rice flour, cooked on a hot griddle without oil and filled with black sesame and jaggery. Made in quantity for Magh Bihu.
Sticky rice steamed inside a green bamboo tube over a fire, so the rice takes the bamboo's scent. Split open and eaten with cream or jaggery.
Fermented bamboo shoot, and a fermented mustard-seed paste — the two ferments that give Assamese food much of its edge, both served in small quantities as accompaniments.
Grown from a distinct varietal, Camellia sinensis var. assamica, discovered growing wild here in the 1820s. The malty CTC that goes into most Indian chai comes overwhelmingly from this valley.
Where to try: An estate bungalow in Jorhat or Dibrugarh, where it is served as first flush without milk.
Staples
Sweets
Street food
Drinks
The food of Brahmaputra Valley — signature dishes, staples, sweets, street food and where to eat them. (11)