ThukpaVegetarian and non-vegetarianMain
Hand-pulled or hand-cut wheat or barley noodles in a bone or vegetable broth with whatever is stored — dried greens, turnip, a little meat. One pot, one fire, and enough liquid to matter at altitude.
Kinnaur & Spiti · Western Himalaya & Trans-Himalaya
Dishes
Read the menu as an altitude profile. In the Sutlej gorge it is recognisably Himachali — wheat roti, rajma, a rice-and-lentil feast dish, mustard oil. By Pooh and Nako the wheat gives way to barley and buckwheat, the dumpling and the noodle soup appear, and salt tea replaces sweet. In Spiti almost everything on the table is barley, milk or dried, and a fresh green vegetable in February is a genuine luxury rather than a figure of speech.
MomoVegetarian and non-vegetarianMain
Steamed dumplings of wheat dough filled with minced meat, or with cheese and greens in the fasting months. In Spiti they are boiled in soup as often as they are steamed dry, and the accompanying chilli sauce is a recent import from the plains.
SidduVegetarianBread
A leavened wheat dough ball stuffed with a paste of ground walnut and poppy seed, left to rise for hours and then steamed. Eaten torn open with ghee or a lentil broth. It belongs to the wider Himachali hills and comes up the Sutlej into lower Kinnaur; it does not travel much past the treeline, because it needs a long warm rise the high villages cannot easily give it.
Tudkiya bhathVegetarianMain
Rice cooked down with lentils, yoghurt, potato and whole spice into something between a pulao and a khichdi. It belongs to the Chamba and middle-Himachal feast repertoire and appears in lower Kinnaur wherever the Pahari dham tradition of a seated communal meal reaches.
Chha gosht and the dham repertoireVegetarian and non-vegetarianFeast
Mutton cooked in yoghurt and gram flour, served as part of a dham — the seated Himachali feast cooked by hereditary botis and eaten in rows off leaf plates. It reaches the Sutlej villages of lower Kinnaur and stops well short of Spiti.
Chilta and buckwheat pancakeVegetarianBreakfast
A thin unleavened pancake of buckwheat flour cooked on a griddle and eaten with ghee, curd or a dried-greens relish. Buckwheat cannot be made into a raised bread, and this is the form it takes instead.
Tsampa with butter teaVegetarianEveryday
Roasted barley flour kneaded into the tea in the bowl itself, by hand, until it forms a stiff dough. It is the default working meal of Spiti and needs no cooking at the point of eating, only hot liquid.
Skyu and thenthukVegetarian and non-vegetarianMain
Thumb-pressed dough shells or torn dough sheets simmered with root vegetables into a thick stew. The dough is pressed hollow so it cooks quickly and holds broth — a shape designed around fuel, not around presentation.
Black pea and rajma stewsVegetarianMain
Cold-hardy pulses soaked overnight and cooked long. The black pea of the high villages is denser and slower to cook than plains gram, and is one of the few sources of protein that stores for a whole winter.
ChilgozaVegetarianSnack
The seed of the chilgoza pine, knocked out of the cone, roasted and cracked. It is a wild-collected forest crop, harvested from village-held stands under long-standing rights of use, and in a good year it is worth more per kilogram than anything else the household sells.
Dried apricot and its kernelVegetarianSnack
The fruit is dried whole on rooftops; the stone is then cracked and the sweet kernel eaten or pressed for oil. Nothing is discarded, which is the operating rule of the entire high-altitude larder.
Sea-buckthorn juiceVegetarianBeverage
The berry is stripped from thorny riverbank scrub, pressed and diluted heavily. Sharply sour and high in vitamin C, it was the local antiscorbutic long before anyone put it in a bottle, and Spiti now processes it commercially at a small scale.
Staples
Naked barley, as tsampa and as grainBuckwheat flourWheat roti in the lower valleysDried and stored vegetablesMilk, butter, curd and churpi
Sweets
Dried apricot and apricot-kernel sweetsKhapse — fried wheat-dough biscuits made in quantity for Losar and kept for weeksSattu-like barley flour worked with butter and jaggeryApple in every dried, pressed and preserved form since the orchards came in
Street food
Momo and thukpa at Kaza and Reckong PeoRoasted chilgoza sold by the paper cone in autumnApple and apricot bought at the roadside straight from the orchardMaggi noodles at every high pass, which is now as fixed a feature of the region as the prayer flags
Drinks
Chhang, the household barley beerArak, distilled from the same mashButter-and-salt tea, churnedSea-buckthorn juiceSweet milk tea in the roadside dhabas, which is the newest arrival of all
The food of Kinnaur & Spiti — signature dishes, staples, sweets, street food and where to eat them. (12)