BharatSangraha

Kinnaur & Spiti · Western Himalaya & Trans-Himalaya

Foodways

This is a kitchen built by altitude and a short season rather than by taste. Above the treeline there is no second crop, no green vegetable for seven months and no cheap fuel, so the food is designed around three constraints — everything must store, everything must be cooked in one pot over scarce wood or dung, and everything must carry enough fat to be worth eating at 4,000 m. Spices are used lightly, not out of restraint but because none of them grow here and all of them had to be carried up. What the region has instead is fermentation and drying. Down the Sutlej, where wood and rain are available, the same kitchen relaxes into the wider Pahari one — mustard oil, a slow-cooked rice-and-lentil tradition, and dishes served at communal feasts.

Primary cooking medium

Cow and dzo ghee, used generously in Spiti and upper KinnaurButter, churned and put into salt tea rather than spreadMustard oil in lower Kinnaur, where it can be carried up cheaplyWalnut and apricot kernel oil in small quantities

Dominant sour agents

Sea-buckthorn berry, wild along the Spiti and Sutlej gravel beds and intensely acidicDried apricot, soaked and used as both sour note and sweetenerFermented buttermilk and the whey left from making churpiWild rhubarb stems in early summerLemon and amchur in lower Kinnaur, both bought in rather than grown

Spice register

Deliberately thin by the standards of anywhere below. Salt, a little ginger and garlic, coriander seed, and a dried red chilli used more for colour than heat. In Spiti even that reduces to salt and butter, and the flavour a dish carries is the flavour of its own fermentation or its own grain. Lower Kinnaur, which had trade access down the Sutlej, uses turmeric, cumin and asafoetida in the way the rest of Himachal does.

Staple grains and carbs

Naked barley — the only cereal that reliably ripens above 3,500 m, and the basis of tsampa, chhang and arakBuckwheat, both the sweet ogla and the bitter phaphra, which tolerate poor soil and a short seasonBlack peas and other cold-tolerant pulses, dried for the winterWheat in lower Kinnaur and, in warm pockets, a little maizeRice, entirely imported, and until recently a festival grain rather than a daily one

Preservation methods

Sun-drying at very low humidity — apricot, apple, turnip, spinach and wild greens all dry in days rather than weeks, which is why the technique carries the whole winter hereChurpi — milk curd pressed, drained and dried to a stone-hard block that keeps for years and is softened in the mouth or in soupMeat air-dried in the cold and hung in the rafters, cooked from dry in winter stewsChhang and arak, which are storage as much as they are drink — barley converted into something that keepsSea-buckthorn pressed for juice, now also processed commercially in SpitiRoot cellars and stone-lined pits below the house, where the frozen ground does the refrigeration

Signature techniques

Chhang brewing

Barley (or in lower Kinnaur, rice or millet bought up from below) is boiled, cooled, mixed with a dried starter cake kept back from the previous batch, and left to ferment in a covered vessel for several days. The result is a cloudy, low-strength beer that is drunk warm in winter and is offered to a guest before anything else. Almost every household makes its own, and the starter cake is a family possession.

Also found in: Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills, Monpa & Tawang Belt

Arak distillation

Fermented barley mash, or in the orchard villages apple and apricot, is distilled at home in a stacked pot still — a vessel of mash below, a collecting bowl inside, a pan of cold water on top, the condensate dripping into the bowl. It is the same principle as a village still anywhere, but here it is domestic, unremarkable and done by women as often as men.

Also found in: Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills

Churpi drying

Skimmed milk is soured, the curd separated and pressed under stone, then cut and hung to dry until it is too hard to bite. It is a way of storing a summer milk surplus into a winter with no fodder, and the hard block is a chewing food for herders as much as a soup ingredient.

Also found in: Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills, Monpa & Tawang Belt

Tsampa roasting

Barley is roasted in hot sand until it pops, then ground fine. The flour is already cooked, so it needs only to be kneaded with tea or water to make a meal — the reason it is the travelling food of the entire Tibetan-speaking Himalaya, where fuel at altitude is the scarce resource, not grain.

Also found in: Monpa & Tawang Belt

Butter-tea churning

Brick tea is boiled long, strained, and churned in a tall wooden cylinder with salt and butter until it emulsifies. It is drunk through the day and functions as fat, salt and hot water in one — the three things a body loses fastest in dry cold.

Also found in: Monpa & Tawang Belt

Steaming over a sealed pot

Leavened wheat dough stuffed with a ground filling is steamed rather than baked, and dumplings are steamed in a tiered vessel over the same water that will become soup. Steaming does more with one fire than frying does, which is the whole argument for it above the treeline.

Also found in: Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills

The foodway signature of Kinnaur & Spiti — cooking medium, souring agents, spice register, staple grains and the techniques that define it. (6)