Kullu & Mandi · Western Himalaya & Trans-Himalaya
The dham is the formal repertoire and it is almost entirely vegetarian; the everyday repertoire is smaller, rougher and includes meat, fish and a great deal of dried and fermented material that never appears at a feast. A third layer arrived with the road — trout in the Beas, put there by British anglers and now farmed at hatcheries along the valley, and the tourist kitchens of Manali, which have been cooking Israeli, Italian and Tibetan food for long enough that some of it has become local.
Leavened wheat dough stuffed with ground walnut and poppy seed, or with spiced urad paste, and steamed. Served hot with ghee poured over it, or with mutton gravy or a green chutney. Winter food, and the one dish that people from this valley miss most reliably when they leave it.
Kidney beans cooked in ghee with whole spices and finished in yoghurt held below a simmer until it thickens without breaking. Kullu-grown rajma is small, dark and thin-skinned, and holds its shape through the long cook better than a plains bean would.
Black chickpeas in a thin, dark, deliberately loose tamarind-and-jaggery gravy, poured over rice by a server walking the row. It resets the palate between the ghee-heavy courses, and every ingredient in it that provides the sourness has been carried up from the plains.
Whole black urad simmered long with ginger and asafoetida and loaded with ghee, cooked thick enough to sit on a leaf plate without running into the next dish.
Rice with sugar or jaggery, raisins, saffron and dry fruit, served last. When it comes down the row the meal is over, and the row knows it.
Leavened wheat dough wrapped round a paste of soaked, ground black gram and fried flat — a hill kachori, standard at fairs and on festival mornings, eaten with tamarind chutney.
A thin wheat-batter pancake cooked on a hot tawa and eaten rolled with ghee, sugar or honey. It is made from a batter rested overnight, which gives it a faint sourness that distinguishes it from a plain crepe.
Lotus stem in thin discs, tossed in gram flour and spices and slow-fried until the fibres crisp at the edges. It comes from wetland lakes rather than from this valley, which makes it a good marker of how far a hill kitchen's supply lines actually reach.
Mutton cooked in a yoghurt-and-gram-flour gravy — the madra technique carried over to meat, with the gram flour stabilising the yoghurt through a longer cook. It is not served at a dham, because a dham does not serve meat.
Mutton finished sour with anardana or amchur instead of tomato and cooked down dry, so the sourness sits on the meat. A winter dish, and a use for the dried sour powders that are the only acid in the house.
Brown and rainbow trout, introduced into the Beas and its tributaries by British anglers and now raised at hatcheries along the valley. Cooked simply — floured, pan-fried with a little chilli and lemon — because the fish is the point and nothing in the local repertoire was designed for it.
A thick pancake of buckwheat flour, sometimes cooked over leaves, belonging originally to Lahaul over the Rohtang crest and eaten in the upper Beas villages that trade and marry across it.
Wild morels gathered on the Great Himalayan slopes after snowmelt, dried, and cooked with rice or in a yoghurt gravy. Almost all of the crop is sold rather than eaten, because the price it fetches away from here is far beyond what a collecting household would spend on a meal.
Fried urad-dal patties simmered in a spinach and yoghurt gravy until they soften through. It belongs most strongly to the Kangra dham and appears here in the western part of the region, which is a fair index of how far the two feast traditions overlap.
Momo, thukpa and thenthuk in every bus stand and bazaar, alongside the Israeli, Italian and Korean cooking that Manali and the Parvati valley have been serving to long-stay travellers since the 1970s. Some of it has been here long enough to count as local.
Staples
Sweets
Street food
Drinks
The food of Kullu & Mandi — signature dishes, staples, sweets, street food and where to eat them. (15)