Dishes
A meal is rice — buh — with one boiled dish, one smoked or fermented seasoning and a pounded raw chutney on the side. Courses do not exist and neither does a sweet ending. Pork is the default meat because the pig converts household waste and jhum surplus into fat, and fat here is a preservative and a seasoning rather than a cooking medium. The same plate, with different words for it, appears from Aizawl to Lamka to Hakha.
BaiBaiVegetarian and non-vegetarianMain
The regional dish. Seasonal greens, beans, edible fern and whatever herbs are at hand are boiled in water with a little chingal, then seasoned with a spoon of sa-um or a knob of bekang. It is soupy, barely salted and served over rice. Versions carry the name of what went in — vawksa rep bai with smoked pork, anthur bai with roselle leaf — and the vegetable list changes every fortnight with what the jhum plot is producing.
Where to try: Any household kitchen; the small eating houses around Zarkawt and Chanmari in Aizawl.
Smoked porkVawksa repNon-vegetarianMain
Pork hung on the hearth rack until it is dark, dry and hard, then rehydrated by long boiling with bamboo shoot, ginger and chilli. Smoking is the storage method, so the dish tastes of the house it was made in — the wood on the fire is the only variable in the recipe.
Where to try: Bara Bazar in Aizawl for the smoked meat itself, sold by weight off the rack.
Fermented pork fatSa-umNon-vegetarianSeasoning
Cooked abdominal pork fat fermented three days or more in a hung bottle gourd. Pungent, semi-liquid and used a spoonful at a time. It divides opinion sharply among visitors and is entirely non-negotiable among Mizos — the taste that a person raised outside the hills is least likely to acquire and most likely to be offered.
Rice porridge with herbsSanpiauVegetarianSnack
A soft savoury rice porridge finished with powdered roasted rice, spring onion, coriander and black pepper, eaten from a bowl with a spoon. It is Aizawl's afternoon snack, sold from small counters and school gates, and one of very few dishes here that is genuinely street food rather than home food carried out.
Where to try: Snack counters around Bara Bazar and Millennium Centre, Aizawl.
Chicken rice porridgeArsa buhchiarNon-vegetarianMain
Rice cooked down with chicken, ginger and garlic into a thick porridge. It is the standard dish for feeding a crowd at a funeral, a church gathering or a community work day, because one pot scales and needs no accompaniment.
Meat-cooked riceSawhchiarNon-vegetarianMain
Rice cooked together with pork, beef or chicken so the grain takes the fat. Where a plains kitchen would layer and season, this one simply puts everything in at the start — the technique is deliberately flat, and the meat is expected to carry it.
Steamed mixed vegetablesChhum hanVegetarianSide
Whatever is green, steamed together with nothing added but salt, and eaten with a chilli chutney. It is the plainest dish in the region and the one that most clearly shows what the kitchen thinks a vegetable should taste of.
Fermented soybeanBekang umVegetarianSide
Soybeans fermented under leaves and ash, then either mashed with chilli into a relish or dropped whole into bai. It belongs to the same family as Naga axone and Manipuri hawaijar, and the three are close enough that a cook from one hill can work with the other's jar without instruction.
Tree bean with smoked porkZawngtahNon-vegetarianMain
Parkia pods — the flat, strong-smelling tree bean known as yongchak in the Imphal valley and petai across Southeast Asia — boiled with smoked pork. The bean is seasonal, briefly available and expensive in the market, and its arrival is treated as an event.
Where to try: Bara Bazar, Aizawl, in the pod season.
Fermented bamboo shootTuaithurVegetarian and non-vegetarianSide
Young shoot sliced and left to sour in water in a covered pot. It is the region's acid — a bai without a tomato gets its edge from this — and it is also cooked as a dish in its own right with pork. Smoke-dried shoot, mautuai rep, is the dry-season equivalent.
Chilli chutneyHmarcha rawtVegetarianCondiment
Bird's-eye chilli pounded raw with garlic, salt and often onion or tomato. Every table has it, and it is the only source of heat in the meal — which is why the cooked dishes can be as mild as they are.
Sticky rice cakeChhangbanVegetarianSnack
Sticky rice pounded fine, formed into flat cakes and eaten with cane jaggery and black tea. It is the closest thing the tradition has to a sweet, and it is a tea-time food rather than a course.
Bamboo-tube chickenNon-vegetarianMain
Chicken, herbs and a splash of water sealed in a green bamboo internode and cooked over embers. Made in the fields and at festivals rather than in a kitchen, because the vessel has to be cut fresh.
Corn and meat stewSabutiNon-vegetarianMain
Hulled maize simmered for hours with beans and meat until it thickens — the defining winter dish of the Chin Hills, made across the ridge from Champhai and rare on the Indian side, where rice displaced maize as the everyday grain.
Staples
Rice (buh), eaten at every meal including breakfastSmoked pork and beefJob's tears and maize as reserve grainsBamboo shoot, fresh, fermented and smoke-driedWild greens and edible fern gathered from the jhum fallow
Sweets
Chhangban with cane jaggeryKurtai — raw cane jaggery, eaten in lumps with teaLittle else — the tradition has no sweet course, and the bakeries of Aizawl are a twentieth-century import
Street food
SanpiauSmoked pork sold by weight at Bara BazarChhangban and cane jaggery with teaBoiled sweetcorn on the roadside in the maize monthsFermented bamboo shoot sold in bottles at every market
Drinks
Thingpui — black tea, drunk constantly and without milk in most households; the social unit of hospitalityZu — rice beer, in the graded forms named in the old songs, central to the pre-Christian festival calendar and now largely out of use after a century of church temperance teachingGrape wine from Hnahlan and the Champhai vineyards, sold under the Zawlaidi label and made from vines planted on the eastern slopesPassion fruit and wild-fruit squashes, a cash crop turned into a drink