BharatSangraha

Bundelkhand · Central Highlands & Forest Belt

Foodways

A dry-country kitchen built on jowar, gram and buttermilk, with millets underneath it and the forest beside it. Where Awadh infuses and Malwa sweetens, Bundelkhand sours and thins: buttermilk does the work that yoghurt and cream do further north, and a great deal of the everyday repertoire is grain cooked in chhaachh rather than in water. Ghee is festival food; mustard oil is everyday. The other half of the diet is gathered rather than grown — mahua flowers, chironji kernels, tendu fruit, karonda, amla and wild greens — which is why a bad monsoon reduces the calorie supply from two directions at once.

Primary cooking medium

Mustard oil, everydayDesi ghee, for festival food, bafla and sweetsGroundnut and soybean oil, which displaced mustard across the southern districts within a generationMahua seed oil (doriya) in forest households

Dominant sour agents

Chhaachh — buttermilk, the primary souring agent and often the cooking liquid itselfAmchur from sun-dried raw mangoImliKaronda, the sour scrub berry that fruits on uncultivated landAmlaLemon and, recently, tomato

Spice register

Blunt and dry — coriander seed, red chilli, turmeric, cumin, ajwain and a heavy hand with asafoetida in the vegetarian kitchen, which does the aromatic work that onion and garlic do elsewhere in households that avoid them. Almost no garam masala and no cream. Against Awadh to the north it is loud and unperfumed; against Malwa to the west it is markedly less sweet; against Bagelkhand to the east it is drier and far less rice-dependent.

Staple grains and carbs

Jowar — the traditional first grain, eaten as roti and as the base of maheraWheat, sown on residual moisture after the monsoonKodo and kutki, the small millets of the forest districtsChana (gram), both as dal and roasted wholeUrad, arhar, til and, increasingly, soybean in the southern districts

Preservation methods

Mahua flowers dried on the threshing floor and stored in sacks for years — the region's genuine famine reserveBadi and badiyan, sun-dried urad-paste nuggets used through the dry monthsAmchur and dried karondaGud, made at the crusher through the post-monsoon and stored in blocksChironji kernels, tendu and mahua seed collected and sold rather than eaten, as cashFish from the tanks, salted and dried where cooperatives lease the water

Signature techniques

Chhaachh cooking (mahera)

Grain — coarse jowar or broken rice — is simmered in buttermilk rather than water, with ginger, green chilli and a tempering. The acid keeps the grains from collapsing into a mass and lets the dish stand through a working day without refrigeration, which is the actual reason it exists. It is breakfast, not a curiosity.

Also found in: Malwa Plateau, Marwar & the Thar, Bagelkhand

Bafna — boil then roast

Wheat dough is shaped into balls, boiled in water until cooked through, then finished over embers or in oil so the outside crisps. Boiling first is what makes a bati possible without a tandoor and without splitting; the bafla is the boiled version, the bati the unboiled one, and the region eats both.

Also found in: Malwa Plateau, Nimar, Marwar & the Thar

Mahua drying and rehydration

Corollas that fall at night are swept up at dawn, dried on the floor to a sticky brown raisin and stored. Dried, they keep for years and carry roughly half their weight in sugar; boiled back they sweeten a flour cake, and fermented and pot-distilled they make the region's liquor. One tree can be worked by one family for a century, and the flowering window is only three or four weeks.

Also found in: Mahakoshal & Gondwana, Bastar, Chota Nagpur Plateau, Bagelkhand

Cane-juice reduction at the crusher

Fresh cane juice ferments within hours, so anything made with it is made at the crusher on the day. Rice cooked directly in boiling juice becomes raskhir; the same juice reduced further becomes gud. Neither dish travels, and both exist only for the six or eight weeks of crushing.

Also found in: Antarved Doab, Braj

Besan setting and cutting

Gram flour is cooked with buttermilk into a stiff paste, spread to set, cut into rolls or diamonds and then tempered or simmered. It converts a flour with no gluten into something that can be handled like a solid — the same problem Rajasthan solves with gatta and Gujarat with khandvi.

Also found in: Marwar & the Thar, Bagelkhand

Okhli husking of small millets

Kodo and kutki have a husk bonded tightly to the grain and are pounded by hand in a wooden okhli with a long pestle, usually by two women working alternate strokes. No village-scale mill handles them, which is part of why millet acreage collapsed once wheat became procurable.

Also found in: Mahakoshal & Gondwana, Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands

The foodway signature of Bundelkhand — cooking medium, souring agents, spice register, staple grains and the techniques that define it. (6)