Kashmir Valley · Western Himalaya & Trans-Himalaya
The wazwan is the region's formal architecture of eating: a sequence of courses served to a trami, a large tinned-copper platter shared by four people who eat with the right hand from a mound of rice divided into quarters. A hand-wash ewer, the tash-t-naar, goes round before and after. The number of dishes is spoken of in thirties but is in practice negotiated; the fixed points are that tabak maaz, rista and marchhwangan korma appear along the way and that gushtaba is served last. Outside the banquet, the everyday plate is rice with haakh and a curd or a dried-vegetable dish, and meat far less often than the wazwan implies.
Lamb braised in a thin, glossy red gravy whose colour is mawal and ratanjot and whose aroma is fennel, dry ginger and asafoetida. The Pandit version has no onion or garlic at all; the Muslim version uses praan and garlic and often a little curd. The name describes the method — cooking in fat until the oil separates and rises — not the redness.
Pounded lamb balls, light enough to be springy, dropped into a red gravy coloured with mawal and finished with fennel and dry ginger. Judged on texture: a rista that crumbles has been ground rather than pounded.
The same pounded paste, made larger and richer with fat, simmered in a white yoghurt gravy held together by continuous stirring. It closes the wazwan, and leaving before it is served is read as a judgement on the host.
Flat squares of lamb ribs simmered in milk with spices until tender, then fried in ghee until the edges crisp. It is eaten with the fingers off the bone and is usually the first thing on the trami.
The one deliberately hot dish of the banquet — lamb in a dark red chilli gravy, placed in the sequence as a contrast so that the yoghurt courses that follow read as relief.
Lamb in a white, uncoloured curd gravy scented with fennel, dry ginger, cardamom and a bay leaf, with no chilli and no turmeric. The household benchmark dish, and the one most often cooked with lotus stem or bottle gourd instead of meat.
Strips of tripe and intestine cooked long with fenugreek greens until the fat renders and the offal turns dark and sweet. A wazwan dish that uses the parts the rest of the banquet does not.
Mutton cooked overnight with pounded rice in a sealed copper pot buried in embers, then beaten to a smooth paste and served at dawn under a spoonful of hot mustard oil with fried onion, eaten with girda. Sold only from about October to March, only in the morning, and only by a handful of downtown Srinagar houses that make nothing else. It is the same idea as the harees of the Gulf and the haleem of the Deccan, arrived by a different road.
Where to try: The harissa shops of Aali Kadal and Fateh Kadal in old Srinagar, before nine in the morning.
Lotus rhizome from the Dal and Wular beds, either sliced into a curd gravy or battered in rice flour and fried as a street snack. Rhizome pulled in the cold months is denser and less fibrous, which is why the good nadru season is winter.
A leafy Brassica grown almost year-round and cooked in water with mustard oil, green chilli and asafoetida and nothing else — no onion, no tomato, no thickening. Eaten with rice at both meals by most households, and the closest thing the valley has to a national dish. Monj haakh, the knol-khol leaf and bulb, is its winter form.
Cubes of firm paneer fried and simmered — in a pale turmeric-and-fennel gravy as chaman, or in a thinner red one as veth chaman. Fried first so the cubes hold their shape in the gravy rather than melting.
Small potatoes pricked all over, deep fried until the skin blisters, then finished in a curd-and-fennel gravy without onion or garlic. The pricking is functional — it lets the gravy into the potato, which is otherwise sealed by frying.
Fish cooked with long white radish, made in almost every household around the winter solstice and at Herath. Lake fish and radish are the two things reliably available in deep winter, which is exactly why the combination became a calendar dish.
Rice cooked in milk with saffron, cinnamon, ghee, sugar and dried fruit and served in the middle of a meal rather than at its end — the sweet course that arrives while the savoury ones are still on the platter.
Fried paneer cubes, almonds, walnuts, raisins and dates in a saffron-and-cardamom sugar syrup, made for weddings and for Eid. Dry rather than milky, and built entirely from things the valley stores.
Staples
Sweets
Street food
Drinks
The food of Kashmir Valley — signature dishes, staples, sweets, street food and where to eat them. (15)