Foodways
This is a low-fat, low-spice, high-forest kitchen, and it is the opposite of everything north of the Vindhya. The staple is millet rather than wheat. The fat is mahua seed oil, used sparingly, with ghee reserved for ritual. The default treatments are boiling, ember-roasting and pounding, not frying. Most of a year's calories come from three sources a field cannot supply — mahua flower as sugar, forest tuber and green as vegetable, and whatever the tanks and streams give. The seasoning is salt, chilli and pounded garlic, and the aroma is expected to come from the ingredient.
Primary cooking medium
Mahua seed oil (tora or dori), pressed from the kernel months after the flower harvestSal seed fat, rendered and used where mahua is shortMustard oil on the northern and eastern edgesTil (sesame) oil in the Narmada beltGhee, but almost only at weddings and ritual meals
Dominant sour agents
Tamarind — the everyday acidAmchur from wild mango, sun-dried on the roofFermented bamboo shoot, packed in salt in an earthen potChapda — red weaver ants and their eggs, whose formic acid is itself the souring agent, in the southern and eastern forest beltAmbadi (roselle) leaf on the Wainganga sideCurd, in the settled Narmada villages only
Spice register
Deliberately thin. Salt, dried or green chilli and raw pounded garlic do most of the work, with a little coriander and turmeric behind them. The older village kitchen has no onion-and-tomato base of the north Indian kind, no garam masala and no asafoetida. Against Malwa to the west there is a fraction of the ghee and none of the sweet-sour habit; against Bastar to the south-east there is much less wild herb; against the Wainganga side of Vidarbha there is nothing like the black-masala heat of saoji cooking, which stops at the state line more sharply than any dish should.
Staple grains and carbs
Kodo (Paspalum scrobiculatum) — the drought grain, sown on gravelly uplandKutki, little millet (Panicum sumatrense) — the fast grain, harvested in ten to twelve weeksRice, including Chinnor of Balaghat, which holds a geographical indicationMaize on the Satpura slopesJowar on the Wainganga plainWheat, but only in the Narmada belt and mostly as a bought grain
Preservation methods
Mahua flowers sun-dried on the threshing floor and stored in sacks for a yearGrain kept in kothi — mud-and-dung bins built into the wall of the houseBamboo shoot in brineAmchur from wild mango, and dried tendu fruitMeat and river fish smoke-dried on a rack above the hearthBadi — sun-dried lentil dumplings, on the eastern and northern edgesMahua seed cake, kept as fuel and manure after the oil is pressed
Signature techniques
Mahua sweeping and the double harvest
The mahua corolla drops overnight and has to be swept up before sunrise, because heat and ants take it within hours. Dried in the sun it turns raisin-dark and holds roughly half its weight in sugar, keeps a year, and becomes the household's sweetener, its grain-extender and its brewing base. Months later the same tree drops a seed, and the kernel is pressed for tora oil. One tree therefore yields the year's sugar in April and the year's cooking fat in July, which is why a mahua tree is inherited, partitioned and quarrelled over like land.
Also found in: Bastar, Chota Nagpur Plateau, Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands, Chhattisgarh Plains
Pej — the millet gruel kept cold
Kodo or kutki boiled thin, left in its own water and drunk cold through the working day rather than reheated. It is the same logic as basi to the east: cooked grain held under water neither spoils in the heat nor needs fuel a second time, and the sour liquid does the work of a drink.
Also found in: Chhattisgarh Plains, Bastar, Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands
Bamboo shoot souring (karil)
Young shoots are sliced, salted and packed into an earthen pot for several weeks until they sour and turn pungent. The result works as a pickle and as an acid, and one pot carries a household through the months when no fresh sour fruit is available.
Also found in: Bastar, Chota Nagpur Plateau, Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills
Chapda — pounding ants raw
Weaver-ant nests are cut down from sal and mango canopy, and the ants and larvae pounded raw with garlic, green chilli and salt. Nothing is cooked, because heat destroys the formic acid that is the whole point. It will not keep a day, so it is made and eaten within an hour of the nest coming down.
Also found in: Bastar, Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands
Leaf-wrapped ember baking
Batter or coarse dough is wrapped in sal or palash leaf and buried in embers rather than cooked on a griddle. The leaf supplies steam so the bread does not dry, scents it, and removes the need for any fat at all — a technique that exists because oil is expensive and leaves are not.
Also found in: Chhattisgarh Plains, Bastar
Roast-and-pound
Tubers, small fish, dried fish and wild greens are dry-roasted on embers or a hot stone and then pounded in a wooden mortar with salt and chilli into a thick chutney rather than being cooked into a gravy. It is the region's default way of turning anything into a side dish, and it uses no water, no oil and no pot.
Also found in: Chota Nagpur Plateau, Bastar