BharatSangraha

Garhwal · Western Himalaya & Trans-Himalaya

Foodways

A kitchen designed around three constraints — altitude, slope and six months without a road. Rain-fed terraces at 1,200–2,200 m will not carry wheat or rice reliably, so the calorie base is finger millet and barnyard millet; the protein comes from pulses that tolerate poor soil and no irrigation, chiefly black soybean and horse gram; and almost everything else is either dried, ground at a water mill, or eaten in the fortnight it is available. There is very little frying, almost no onion-tomato base of the plains kind, and the aromatic signature is a single seed — jakhiya — popped in hot oil where the plains would use cumin or mustard.

Primary cooking medium

Mustard oil, pressed locally in the middle hillsGhee, treated as a status food and eaten deliberately at Ghee Sankranti rather than dailyBhang (hemp) seed, ground into chutney for its own oilChyura or Indian butter tree fat in the lower valleys, used where dairy fat is scarce

Dominant sour agents

Buttermilk, the everyday souring and cooking liquidLemon and the sharp hill citrus called galgalTimur — Himalayan prickly ash, numbing rather than sour, used in chutney with lemonAmchur and dried apricot in the high valleys

Spice register

Restrained and seed-led. Jakhiya, coriander seed, turmeric, a little local red chilli, and the whole coriander-and-garlic pounding that goes into chutney. Garam masala is a recent arrival from the plains. Compared with Kumaon across the watershed the Garhwali plate is slightly wetter — kafuli, phaanu and jholi are all pourable dishes eaten over rice — and compared with Kangra or Kullu it uses far less dairy and far more millet.

Staple grains and carbs

Mandua — finger millet, the winter staple, dark and made into roti with boiling-water doughJhangora — barnyard millet, quick to mature and the crop that survives a bad yearJhungora and koni millets in the drier Rath and Salan slopesRice on the irrigated valley-bottom terraces, called seraWheat, only where there is water and only in the last few generations at scaleBuckwheat and barley above 2,500 m in the Bhotiya valleys

Preservation methods

Sun-drying on slate roofs — colocasia leaves, radish, green vegetables, gahat and bhatt podsRoasting pulses before storage, which drives off moisture and doubles as the first cooking stepFresh butter clarified to ghee as the only way to hold milk fat through a winterPickles of lingda (fiddlehead fern), timur and green chilli in mustard oilSeed grain and chilli hung in baskets in the smoke above the hearth through the monsoon

Signature techniques

Jakhiya tempering

The seed of Cleome viscosa, a weed of hill fields, popped in hot mustard oil until it crackles. It behaves like mustard seed but tastes nutty rather than pungent, and it is the single flavour that identifies a Uttarakhand hill dish at one taste. It is barely known a hundred kilometres in any direction, because the plant is gathered rather than farmed and does not travel as a commodity.

Also found in: Kumaon

Gharat milling

A horizontal-wheel water mill driven by a diverted channel, grinding at low speed and low temperature. Millet flour goes rancid quickly, and the slow cold grind of a gharat is credited locally with a sweeter flour and a longer keeping life than a powered chakki. Village mills were customarily paid in a measured share of the grain rather than in cash.

Also found in: Kumaon, Kullu & Mandi, Kangra & Dhauladhar, Kinnaur & Spiti

Dry-roasting and stone grinding of pulses

Black gram or horse gram is dry-roasted in an iron kadhai or on a stone griddle, then ground on a silbatta or at the gharat, and only then cooked. Chainsoo is exactly this sequence, and the roasting is why a dish of plain black gram tastes of smoke and nut rather than of pulse.

Also found in: Kumaon

Rice-slurry thickening

Greens are boiled, chopped fine and finished with a slurry of soaked ground rice or millet, which sets the dish to a pourable, slightly glossy consistency without any dairy or flour. Kafuli is the type specimen. It is a thickening method for a place with more grain than milk.

Also found in: Kumaon

High-altitude sun-drying

Above 1,500 m the air is dry, the ultraviolet is strong and the nights are cold, so vegetables dry hard and fast without moulding. Colocasia leaf, radish, gourd and greens are dried on slate roofs in September and October and rehydrated through the winter — the same logic as the Kashmiri hokh syun and the Ladakhi dried greens, arrived at independently by the same altitude.

Also found in: Kashmir Valley, Ladakh & Zanskar, Kinnaur & Spiti, Kumaon

Buttermilk and grain fermentation

Curd is churned daily and the buttermilk becomes the cooking liquid for jholi, thickened with a little millet or gram flour and tempered with jakhiya. In the Bhotiya valleys a millet or rice mash is fermented into jaan, drunk warm at altitude and traded on the same routes as the wool.

Also found in: Kumaon, Kinnaur & Spiti, Ladakh & Zanskar

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