BharatSangraha

Malwa Plateau · Central Highlands & Forest Belt

Foodways

Malwa eats snacks as meals. The plateau's kitchen is built on gram flour, wheat and a fine-tuned frying tradition, and its most characteristic items — poha at eight in the morning, sev at every hour, garadu in winter, a fried bafla instead of a boiled dumpling — are all things a shop can make in quantity and a household will not bother making at home. That is a commercial town's foodway, and it comes from a plateau that had a cash crop and a trading population long before it had industry. Layered onto it is a Maratha kitchen the Holkars and Puars brought up from the Deccan in the 1730s, which is why poha, sabudana khichdi, shrikhand and puran poli are Malwa staples and are not staples two hundred kilometres north.

Primary cooking medium

Groundnut and soybean oil for everyday fryingDesi ghee, poured over bafla until it dripsMustard oil only in pickle, not in cooking

Dominant sour agents

Amchur, from the plateau's mango cropKachri and dried kokum in the Maratha-descended dishesLemon, squeezed onto garadu and poha at the point of servingCurd and buttermilk, which do most of the souring in the household kitchenTamarind, sparingly, and mainly at the Nimar-facing edge

Spice register

A restrained chilli level with an aggressive aromatic overlay. The plateau's signature is jeeravan — an Indore blend built on cumin, black salt, dried mango and asafoetida, dusted on top of finished food rather than cooked into it — and its sev carries clove and black pepper. Malwa is markedly milder than the Nimar valley below the scarp and milder than Vidarbha to the south-east; where the Rajasthan fringe begins, coriander goes up and chilli goes red rather than hot.

Staple grains and carbs

Wheat — the plateau's rabi crop and the base of bafla, bati and rotiJowar in the drier northern and western marginsMaize, especially on the Vindhya scarp and in the Bhil hillsGram (chana), eaten as dal, as flour and roasted wholeSoybean, which now covers more Malwa acreage than any food grain and is almost entirely crushed for oil

Preservation methods

Amchur — green mango sliced and sun-dried on rooftops in MayMango, lime and chilli pickles put down in mustard oil at the start of the hot weatherPapad and badi of urad and moong, dried on cots through the summerGarlic braided and hung — the Ratlam and Mandsaur belt stores its crop this way for monthsMawa, made by reducing milk so it will keep, and the basis of half the region's sweets

Signature techniques

Bafla — boiled, then baked

A wheat dough ball is boiled in water first and only then roasted over embers or baked, which is the entire difference between Malwa's bafla and Rajasthan's bati. Boiling gelatinises the starch, so the interior stays soft and soaks up ghee instead of crumbling. A bati is a dry biscuit by comparison, and Malwa will tell you so.

Also found in: Nimar, Hadoti, Mewar

Poha steaming

Flattened rice is rinsed, drained and then steamed in a covered pot over the tempering rather than stirred through it, so the grains swell separately and stay distinct. Indore's shops hold it in large covered vessels over low heat all morning; the seasoning — onion, sev, jeeravan, lemon, sometimes pomegranate — goes on at the moment of serving, never before.

Also found in: Nimar, Desh, Khandesh

Sev extrusion

Seasoned gram-flour dough is pressed through a perforated plate (the sancha) straight into hot oil, so the strand fries as it forms. Plate diameter sets the product — hair-fine barik sev, the thicker laung sev of Ratlam carried through with clove and pepper, the ratlami with its heavier spicing — and the same equipment makes the gathiya and the bhujia of neighbouring regions.

Also found in: Nimar, Marwar & the Thar, Hadoti

Jeeravan finishing

A dry blend dusted over food after cooking rather than during it. Because the aromatics are never heated, the volatile notes survive to the plate — which is the whole reason Indore poha tastes unlike poha anywhere else, since the poha itself is barely seasoned.

Also found in: Nimar

Mawa reduction

Milk boiled down in a wide iron kadhai, worked constantly against the base until it is a solid. Malwa's sweet economy runs on it — mawa bati, mawa jalebi, the gulab jamun of the temple towns — and the reduction exists because it turns a perishable into something that will travel a day on a cart.

Also found in: Nimar, Braj, Hadoti

Chakki ki shaak

Wheat dough is kneaded and then washed repeatedly under water until only the gluten remains, and the rubbery mass is steamed, sliced and simmered in a curd gravy. It is the wheat belt's answer to a vegetable in a season with no vegetables, and it is made almost nowhere outside Malwa and Nimar.

Also found in: Nimar

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