Khasi & Jaintia Hills · Northeast Hill Massif
Two overlapping registers. The everyday one is rice, a broth, a meat or fish preparation and a chilli, eaten twice a day and cooked in one pot. The other is the jadoh stall — a small counter, usually run by a woman, serving a fixed short menu of rice-with-meat plates from morning until the pot is finished. Shillong's jadoh stalls are the most public form Khasi food takes, and they are cheap, fast and entirely unromantic about it.
Rice cooked in pork blood with chopped pork, fat, ginger, onion, bay and black pepper until every grain has taken the colour. Served as a plate on its own with a broth and a chilli beside it. It is the dish the region is identified by, and the version made with the blood left out is a different and much plainer thing.
Where to try: The jadoh stalls around Ïewduh and Police Bazar in Shillong, from mid-morning.
Boiled pork, classically from the head, chopped fine and tossed while still warm with raw onion, ginger, green chilli and lime. It is served cool, has no cooking fat added, and works as the sharp counterweight to everything else on the plate.
Where to try: Any jadoh stall; also on most Shillong restaurant menus.
Pork simmered with onion, ginger and a coarse paste of toasted black sesame until the gravy is black and thick. No ground spice mix, no tomato, and no chilli heat to speak of — the flavour is sesame oil released by roasting.
Where to try: Trattoria in Shillong, and jadoh stalls across the hills.
Fermented soybean pounded with ginger, garlic, black sesame and chilli and cooked down with pork fat and often pork belly. Assertive, and the single dish most likely to divide a table of visitors.
Rice cooked together with meat, turmeric and aromatics but without blood — the yellow counterpart to jadoh, and the usual choice at feasts where blood is not being used.
Powdered soaked rice steamed in a conical earthen pot to a soft warm crumb, eaten in place of boiled rice alongside meat. It is the ceremonial rice form as well as an everyday one.
A soft, pale, slightly sour pancake of fermented ground rice, cooked on a griddle. Eaten with pork gravy, or with sweetened cream as a snack.
Rice flour and jaggery worked to a batter and deep-fried into a dark, chewy disc. The standard tea-time and market sweet, and the one a Khasi household is most likely to make at home.
The tuber of Flemingia vestita, scraped clean, sliced and eaten raw with a dressing of mustard paste and sometimes dried fish. Crisp, faintly sweet, and sold by the basket in winter markets.
Small fish salted and fermented to a dark paste, then pounded with chilli, onion and mustard oil. Used a teaspoon at a time; it carries a whole meal.
The thin clear broths that accompany a rice plate — syrwa doh from meat bones, and lighter versions from vegetables. They are served in a separate bowl and drunk rather than poured over the rice.
Chicken cooked in the same black sesame gravy as pork, and the usual substitute where pork is not eaten.
Local greens — jamyrdoh, mustard leaf and wild ferns — quickly boiled or lightly fried with sesame. The vegetable side of the plate is deliberately plain, and there is a lot of it.
Smoke-cured meat taken off the rack above the fire, soaked, and simmered with local greens. Increasingly rare as fresh meat became reliable, but still the winter cooking of the higher villages.
In the Jaintia hills the local turmeric is used fresh and in quantity, in broths and with meat. Its curcumin content is unusually high, which is what earned it a geographical indication in 2024.
Staples
Sweets
Street food
Drinks
The food of Khasi & Jaintia Hills — signature dishes, staples, sweets, street food and where to eat them. (15)