Garhwal · Western Himalaya & Trans-Himalaya
Two registers. The everyday village plate is millet roti, a pulse and a green, cooked with jakhiya, salt and almost nothing else, and it is eaten twice a day. The ceremonial plate is entirely different — rice, arsa, swala, ghee and jaggery, put out at weddings and at deity festivals, and historically the only time most households ate wheat or refined sugar. Meat appears at deity festivals and weddings and is cooked plainly; it is an event, not a category.
Finger-millet flour worked with boiling water — it has no gluten, so it must be patted out by hand rather than rolled — and cooked on a griddle or in the ash. Dark, dense, faintly bitter and very high in calcium and iron. Eaten with ghee, or with gahat dal in winter.
Black gram dry-roasted whole, ground coarse and then simmered slowly in an iron kadhai until it is thick, dark and smoky. It is famously heavy and famously slow, and it is eaten in winter and at altitude for exactly that reason.
Gahat or a mix of pulses soaked overnight, coarsely ground and cooked to a loose, soupy dal, often with a little jakhiya and garlic. Thinner than chainsoo and made from soaked rather than roasted pulse — the same raw material handled two opposite ways.
Spinach, fenugreek or wild greens boiled, chopped and set with a slurry of ground rice, then tempered. Served over rice in an iron dish, and generally described locally as the Garhwali dish, ahead of anything more elaborate.
Buttermilk thickened with a little gram or millet flour, turned with turmeric and finished with jakhiya and garlic. The everyday sauce of the hills, made from what is left after the butter is taken out.
Radish or potato crushed rather than cut — thecha means to pound — so the broken surfaces take up the spice. Usually cooked with gahat. Texture is the entire point of the dish and a knife destroys it.
Boiled potato cut into thumb-sized pieces and tossed in mustard oil with jakhiya, red chilli and coriander. The standard travel food, the standard breakfast and the standard thing put in front of a guest. Eaten with bhang ki chutney.
Hemp seed roasted and ground on a stone with lemon, green chilli, cumin and salt into a grey, oily, slightly bitter paste. The seed is culinary and carries no intoxicant; the plant grows as a weed on field margins across the hills and the seed is gathered rather than sown.
Stinging nettle, cut young with a sickle, boiled to disarm it and then cooked as a green or a thin soup. A hunger food that turned into a valued one, harvested from the same field edges that people avoid touching.
Horse gram, cooked as a dark thin dal or ground and stuffed into a paratha. It is the winter pulse of the hills, credited in household practice with heating the body and with breaking kidney stones — a belief old enough that the crop is grown partly for it.
Several pulses cooked together long and hard, and only the strained liquor eaten, poured over rice. Strong in the Tons and Jaunsar country and in the upper Tehri valleys, and served at scale at village feasts.
Barnyard millet simmered in milk with jaggery or sugar. The grain holds its bite instead of dissolving, which is why it is used here where the plains would use rice or vermicelli.
Rice soaked, dried, ground and worked with hot jaggery syrup, then deep-fried into a dark, dense, slightly chewy round. It is a wedding sweet before it is a shop sweet — the bride's family sends arsa with her, and the quantity is counted.
Swala are fried wheat breads made for ceremonies; roat is a thick wheat-and-jaggery bread enriched with ghee and offered at temples, then broken and distributed. Both mark an occasion by using wheat, ghee and sugar at once.
Goat, at deity festivals, weddings and the winter Pandav Lila, cooked plainly in an iron kadhai with jakhiya, salt, turmeric and local chilli, and often distributed by household share. In the Bhotiya valleys meat is also dried in the cold air and kept through the winter.
Staples
Sweets
Street food
Drinks
The food of Garhwal — signature dishes, staples, sweets, street food and where to eat them. (15)