Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands · Central Highlands & Forest Belt
Two kitchens again, but divided by altitude rather than by community. The hill kitchen is millet, gathered forest food and very little oil; the lowland kitchen of Kalahandi and Bolangir is rice, dal, ambila and the festival pitha, and reads much closer to western Odisha. Market towns like Jeypore and Bhawanipatna hold a third, later layer — the tea shop, the ghuguni pot and the mutton hotel.
Ragi porridge, boiled thin and drunk cold, usually soured with torani and taken with nothing more than salt and a raw onion or a green chilli. It is the highland's calorie base and the reason the region's diet is far higher in calcium and iron than a rice-eating plain.
Cooked rice left overnight under water and eaten the next day with its sour liquor, badi, a fried green and whatever the day offers. In the uplands it is a summer necessity rather than the ritual observance it is on the coast.
Little millet cooked and served exactly as rice would be, with dal or a green. It cooks faster than rice, keeps badly once cooled, and is grown on plots too dry and too steep for paddy.
Red weaver ants and their eggs, taken from leaf nests in the canopy with a long pole in the hot months, cleaned, and ground on stone with garlic, salt and dried chilli. It is intensely sour and faintly metallic; the sourness is formic acid, not tamarind. Eaten as a chutney and taken as a remedy for fever and cough.
Where to try: Weekly haats through the Koraput and Rayagada uplands in the hot months.
Wild mushroom curry. A dozen or more named kinds appear in sequence after the first rains — sal-forest, termite-mound and bamboo-clump types among them — each with its own price and its own short window. The first flush is the one cash crop a household can gather without owning land.
Where to try: Roadside sellers on the Koraput–Jeypore and Rayagada–Muniguda roads in June and July.
Fermented bamboo shoot cooked with dried fish or with pumpkin and potato. The ferment carries the dish; the spicing is only garlic, chilli and turmeric.
Goat cooked slowly in an earthen pot with pounded garlic, dried chilli and fresh turmeric, and nothing else — no onion paste, no whole garam masala, no thickener. The gravy is thin and stains red from the chilli rather than from tomato.
Where to try: The mutton hotels behind Jeypore's main market, and any wedding.
Very small reservoir and stream fish fried whole and crushed with salt and chilli, or dried and stored. The Balimela and Kolab reservoirs made a fishery where there had been only stream catch.
Pigeon pea cooked with sun-dried mango slices for sourness and finished with garlic burnt in niger oil. The pigeon pea is not a field crop here but a hedge and bund plant, harvested from between other crops.
Fried greens, but the list is long and mostly wild — koshala, madaranga, poi, drumstick leaf, tamarind shoot, kalama from the tank edges. Households name and use thirty or more leafy plants, most of which have no market and no English name.
A sour stew of mixed vegetables — pumpkin, brinjal, drumstick, colocasia — soured with tamarind or dried mango and thickened with a little rice flour. The lowland's everyday dish and a marker of Kosli cooking.
The plateau's short black aromatic rice, cooked plain for offerings or simmered with milk and jaggery. It yields poorly and is grown for its scent, which is why it survived as a ceremonial grain when the higher yielding varieties took the good land.
Ragi flour worked with a little jaggery or dried mahua, pressed flat on a leaf and cooked on the hearthstone or steamed. The commonest way of eating millet as something other than gruel.
Wild yams and tubers dug in the lean months, some of them requiring repeated boiling and a change of water before they are safe to eat — knowledge held by particular households and taught rather than assumed.
Dried mahua flowers pounded with millet or rice flour and pressed into cakes. Mahua flower is a sugar source before it is anything else, and this is what that means at the hearth.
Dried peas boiled down with spices and served with an onion-and-lime scatter, alongside deep-fried potato and brinjal chops. The market-town food of Jeypore, Bhawanipatna and Balangir, and the thing the whole region eats on a bus journey.
Staples
Sweets
Street food
Drinks
The food of Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands — signature dishes, staples, sweets, street food and where to eat them. (16)