Imphal Valley · Northeast Hill Massif
A meal is a plate of rice with four or five small preparations set around it, each with a different job: a boiled stew, a mash, a raw salad, a chilli paste and something sour. Fish is the default protein, from Loktak, from the paddy fields themselves and from the pot; pork and chicken appear at feasts; and there is a full parallel vegetarian repertoire, because Vaishnav households and temple kitchens cook the same dishes with fermented soybean or nothing at all in place of the ngari.
Vegetables — potato, beans, colocasia, yongchak, whatever the season gives — boiled and then mashed with roasted ngari and a great deal of roasted chilli, finished with chopped chives. Coarse, fiery and eaten by the spoonful with rice. If one dish stands for the valley, it is this one.
The everyday stew: seasonal vegetables simmered in water with ngari, chilli, chive and often a piece of dried fish. Nothing is fried first, and the liquid is drunk as part of the dish.
A raw salad of shredded banana flower, lotus stem, cabbage or wild greens tossed with roasted chilli powder, ngari, toasted gram flour and perilla. Sold as street food in the afternoon and eaten as a course at home. The gram flour is a binder, not a batter.
Umorok chilli pounded with roasted ngari and steamed or roasted into a thick paste. Half a teaspoon beside the rice; it is the heat control for the whole meal.
Fish curry, most often with Loktak or river fish, cooked in a thin gravy with tomato, chive and chilli. The one preparation in the repertoire that uses oil with any confidence.
Rice cooked down with hawaijar, ngari, vegetables and often a leaf-wrapped bundle until it becomes a thick, strongly savoury porridge. A winter dish, and the most intensely fermented thing in the kitchen.
Eromba made with the tree bean, Parkia — pungent, sulphurous, and completely non-negotiable in season. The pods are sold in bundles at Ima Keithel and the smell reaches the customer before the stall does.
Dried peas cooked with an alkali until they collapse, with bamboo shoot, chives and sometimes tender pea shoots. Alkaline rather than acidic, which makes it unlike anything on the plate beside it.
Boiled potato mashed with raw mustard oil, roasted chilli and chives. A three-ingredient dish that depends entirely on the oil being unheated.
A thick cake of gram flour, herbs, chilli, ngari and sometimes fish, wrapped in turmeric leaf and steamed or baked in embers until firm. Made for feasts and for festivals.
The water-fermented bamboo shoot version of the everyday stew — sharper, cleaner and the most common vegetarian main in the valley.
Fish with herbs and chilli wrapped in banana leaf and cooked over coals, so it steams in its own liquid. Field-fish cooking, from the season when paddy water is drained.
Black rice simmered slowly in milk until the grain gives up its colour and the pudding turns deep purple. Chak-hao holds a geographical indication; the colour is anthocyanin in the bran, and because the bran is left on, the grain takes far longer to cook than white rice.
Boiled chickpeas dressed with chilli, herbs and a sour agent, sold from stalls and bowls around the markets of Imphal. The valley's most-eaten snack.
Fritters of banana flower, pea or gram flour, made in quantity for Yaoshang and festival days — the exception that proves how little else here is fried.
Staples
Sweets
Street food
Drinks
The food of Imphal Valley — signature dishes, staples, sweets, street food and where to eat them. (15)