Chota Nagpur Plateau · Central Highlands & Forest Belt
One kitchen with three registers. The Adivasi village kitchen — rice, handia, wild greens, forest mushroom, fermented shoot, occasional meat tied to a sacrifice. The Sadan and Kurmi cultivator kitchen of the plateau villages, which adds pulses, dahi and the rice-batter breakfast repertoire. And the town kitchen of Ranchi, Jamshedpur and Dhanbad, which is a migration record in itself — Bengali, Bihari, Odia and Marwari cooking layered over the plateau's own by a century of industry.
Ground rice and chana dal batter deep-fried into a thick, soft-centred disc, eaten with a thin black-gram or potato curry and a coarse mint-and-chilli chutney. The plateau's most recognisable breakfast and the one item every roadside stall from Ranchi to Dumka makes.
Where to try: Any morning stall in Ranchi, Hazaribagh or Bokaro.
A thin, lace-edged pancake of wet-ground rice batter cooked on a tawa without fermentation, eaten with chutney or with a spoonful of ghee. Distinct from a dosa in having no lentil and no souring.
Wild puffball mushrooms from sal root zones, cooked plainly with garlic, onion and a little mustard oil. They appear for a few days after the first monsoon storms, cannot be farmed, and are the most expensive thing in the market when they do.
Finger-millet flour as a dark, dense roti or as a stiff hand-rolled ball eaten with a thin curry. The upland staple, and the crop that survives a failed monsoon.
Bauhinia leaves, sanai flower, gandhari, chakor and a long list of others, boiled and tempered in mustard oil. Bitterness is the point. Different greens are in season in different weeks, so the same dish is a different plant every fortnight.
Monsoon shoot cooked fresh, or salted and fermented into a sour pickle used to season a whole pot. Common in the Singhbhum and Odisha-facing villages, thinner on the northern plateau.
Rice beer fermented with a ranu herbal starter in an earthen pot, strained through cloth and drunk cloudy. Offered to the ancestors before anyone drinks, served to guests, and supplied to every work party. Brewed by women, and sold by women at village markets.
Steamed rice-flour dumplings, filled sweet with jaggery and coconut or savoury with dal or crushed pulses. Made in bulk at Sohrai, Karam and weddings — a festival food that has become a daily one.
Rice flour worked with jaggery syrup, rested, and fried into a chewy disc. It keeps for days, which is why it travels to fairs and is what a household sends with a departing guest.
Fried batter discs in syrup, and a stamped wheat-and-jaggery biscuit. Both come from the plains to the north with the Chhath and Karam calendars and are strongest on the plateau's northern rim.
Meat here is occasional and tied to a sacrifice, a festival or a guest. It is cut small, boiled with turmeric, garlic and dry chilli in mustard oil, and served thin rather than thick. Kadaknath, the black-meat fowl, is kept in this belt, but its geographical indication belongs to Jhabua in Madhya Pradesh.
Small fish and monsoon crabs from the plateau streams, wrapped in sal leaf with salt and pounded chilli and cooked in the hearth ash. The catch is small and the method is built for a small catch.
Roasted grain mixtures and roasted gram flour. These belong properly to Magadh and the Bhojpur plains and thin out as you climb the plateau. Litti, the baked sattu-stuffed wheat ball, is a Magadh dish and is not a plateau one, whatever the restaurant menus in Ranchi now say.
Dried mahua flowers steamed or roasted and bound with millet flour or sal kernel. Sweet without sugar, and the standard March and April food of a forest household.
A dense, slightly grainy khoya sweet made in quantity around the Baidyanath temple and carried away by pilgrims. It belongs to the pilgrimage economy rather than to the plateau's own kitchen.
Where to try: The lanes around the Baidyanath temple at Deoghar.
Bengali-style chop and cutlet, Bihari litti-chokha, Odia dalma and Marwari kachori sold within a hundred metres of one another. The industrial towns did not develop a cuisine so much as accumulate one.
Staples
Sweets
Street food
Drinks
The food of Chota Nagpur Plateau — signature dishes, staples, sweets, street food and where to eat them. (16)