BharatSangraha

Nimar · Central Highlands & Forest Belt

Foodways

Nimar cooks coarse grain over wood and eats it hot. Where Malwa's plateau kitchen is built on wheat, gram flour and a shop that fries, the valley's is built on jowar and maize, on chillies that are grown here in quantity rather than bought, and on a technique set that assumes an open fire and a leaf rather than a stove and a pan. The single most Nimadi thing on a plate is a maize roti that has been baked wrapped in leaves in the embers, served with a dal it was cooked beside. The second is the amount of chilli — the valley grows one of Madhya Pradesh's largest chilli crops and does not treat the heat as a condiment.

Primary cooking medium

Groundnut oil for everyday cookingGhee at feasts and on bafla, poured rather than measuredMahua and other forest oils in the Satpura and Vindhya slope households

Dominant sour agents

Tamarind, used far more heavily than on the plateau aboveKokum and amchurButtermilk and soured buttermilk, which carry most of the everyday sournessLemonRaw mango through the hot months

Spice register

Chilli first. Nimar is markedly hotter than Malwa and closer in register to Khandesh and Vidarbha to its south — a dry red-chilli heat, garlic-forward, with a coarse pounded thecha of green chilli and garlic served beside the meal rather than cooked into it. Coriander and cumin do the aromatic work; the plateau's finishing masalas are used here but with a much smaller share of the total flavour.

Staple grains and carbs

Jowar — the region's oldest staple and still the everyday bhakri grainMaize, which is what pania is made ofWheat, at feasts and in the townsTuvar dal, grown alongside cotton in the same fieldsKodo and kutki millets on the Satpura slope, in Bhil and Barela households

Preservation methods

Whole red chillies dried on the roof and on the field bund after the winter pickingMahua flowers dried and stored for the year — food, sweetener and the base for distillingChironji, tendu and amla gathered from the Satpura forest and driedPapad, badi and sun-dried gourd and fenugreekButtermilk soured deliberately and kept for the summer raabdi

Signature techniques

Pania — baking in leaves

Maize dough is patted flat, wrapped in palash, castor or turmeric leaves and buried in the embers of a wood fire. The leaf chars, the bread inside steams as much as it bakes, and it takes a distinct green scent off the wrapper. It is a technique that needs no vessel at all, which is why it survives in the fields and at picnics as much as in kitchens.

Also found in: Mahakoshal & Gondwana, Khandesh

Bafla — boiled, then baked

Wheat balls boiled in water before being roasted over embers, so the interior gelatinises and takes up ghee instead of crumbling. Nimar and Malwa share the technique and disagree about almost nothing else at the table.

Also found in: Malwa Plateau, Hadoti

Thecha pounding

Green chilli, garlic and salt crushed on a flat stone with a roller, sometimes with roasted peanut, and served raw beside the meal. Nothing is cooked, so the heat is unbuffered — the point is that each mouthful is adjusted by the eater rather than by the cook.

Also found in: Khandesh, Desh, Vidarbha

Mahua handling

The corolla of the mahua flower drops at night in April and is swept up at dawn before the sun takes the sugar out of it. Dried, it keeps for a year and is cooked into breads, sweets and porridge, or fermented and distilled. Madhya Pradesh legalised mahua liquor as a licensed heritage product in 2021, which moved a very old household process into a regulated one.

Also found in: Mahakoshal & Gondwana, Bastar, Khandesh

Raabdi souring

Maize or jowar flour is cooked into buttermilk and left to sour in an earthen pot, then drunk cool and salted through the hot months. It is a way of making a grain drinkable and a dairy product keep, in a place where both matter, and it shares nothing but a name with the milk sweet of the north.

Also found in: Malwa Plateau, Marwar & the Thar

Chakki ki shaak

Wheat dough washed under water until only the gluten is left, then steamed, sliced and simmered in a curd gravy — a vegetable made out of flour, for a season with no vegetables in it. Nimar and Malwa are effectively the only regions that make it.

Also found in: Malwa Plateau

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