Chhattisgarh Plains · Central Highlands & Forest Belt
A rice kitchen with two registers. The everyday one is boiled, steamed, soured and barely oiled. The feast one appears only at weddings, Diwali and Hareli and does the opposite — it fries in ghee, uses wheat instead of rice, and serves on a sal-leaf plate. Sohari, the ghee-fried wheat bread, signals a feast precisely because wheat is the grain nobody here grows.
Yesterday's rice under its own soured water, salted, with raw onion, green chilli and a pickle or a dried-fish side. Eaten at dawn before the fields, cool and slightly fizzy. It is the single most widely eaten thing in the region and it is a genuine daily practice, not a revival.
A rice-flour pancake, plain or with urad in the batter, cooked on a griddle with a smear of oil and eaten with green chutney. The everyday breakfast when it is not basi season.
Rice dough rolled into short fingers, steamed, then tossed in a mustard and curry-leaf tempering. Sometimes made sweet with jaggery inside, in which case it becomes a festival dish rather than a meal.
Thick rice-flour bread wrapped in a sal or palash leaf and baked in embers. It comes out with the leaf's veins printed on it and a faint smoke in the crumb, and it is made without a drop of oil.
Rice dough squeezed in the fist and steamed, so every piece keeps the finger grooves of whoever made it. Eaten with chutney or dropped into a thin curry.
Soaked chana dal ground coarse with garlic and chilli, shaped and steamed rather than fried. It is the plain's answer to the pakoda, and it exists because oil was expensive and a steamer was not.
Raw urad dumplings dropped straight into a simmering curd-and-besan kadhi, where they cook and swell. Nothing is fried at any stage, which is what separates it from the kadhi of every neighbouring region.
A thin, hot, sour stew of mixed vegetables and often bamboo shoot, soured with amchur or tamarind and built on garlic rather than onion. Strongest towards the southern approach, where the plain meets the Bastar plateau, and thinner as you move north.
Sun-dried urad or ash-gourd dumplings fried and simmered in a light gravy. The monsoon staple, made possible entirely by work done three months earlier on a roof.
The plate of the fortnight's green — charota, koliyari, chench, bohar, munga, amari, lakhdi — boiled, squeezed and finished with garlic. Most are foraged rather than grown, and each has a season a household can name to the week.
A deep-fried rice-flour puri made for feasts and commonly eaten with meat. Rice flour fries into something crisper and more brittle than wheat, and the dish is built around that difference.
Ghee-fried wheat bread served on a sal-leaf plate at weddings and ritual meals. Wheat is not grown here, so serving it is the announcement — the bread signals the occasion by being the wrong grain.
Plain boiled rice of the short-grained, intensely aromatic Jeeraphool landrace of the northern districts, which holds a geographical indication. Served with almost nothing, because the point of a scented landrace is that it does not need anything.
Rice flour and jaggery steamed in a leaf parcel at Hareli. Made in quantity, distributed, and not sold in shops.
Fermented ground-rice batter shaped, deep-fried and soaked in jaggery or sugar syrup. The souring of the batter is deliberate and is what keeps it from cloying; it is the region's signature sweet and travels badly.
The Diwali and Hareli pair — khurmi is a hard wheat-and-jaggery biscuit fried and sometimes rolled in sesame; thethri is its savoury opposite, a twisted gram-flour crisp. Made at home in large batches and exchanged between households.
Staples
Sweets
Street food
Drinks
The food of Chhattisgarh Plains — signature dishes, staples, sweets, street food and where to eat them. (16)