Dishes

Fermented dried fishBermaNon-vegetarianBase ingredient

Small freshwater fish, sun-dried and fermented, pressed into cakes and sold by weight. It goes into vegetables, meat, chutney and broth, and a Tripuri kitchen without it is not recognisable as one. Its smell is the first thing a visitor notices in a hill market and the last thing they get used to.

Where to try: Any market in Agartala; Battala and Maharajganj bazaars for the widest range.

GudokGudokVegetarian and non-vegetarianMain

The signature dish. Vegetables — often bamboo shoot, jackfruit or seasonal greens — with berma, chilli and garlic, packed into a green bamboo tube or a covered pot and cooked slowly with no oil. The bamboo version tastes faintly of the culm; the pot version does not, which is the whole argument for cutting fresh bamboo.

Where to try: Mui borok kitchens in Agartala and roadside eating houses on the Udaipur and Amarpur roads.

ChakhwiChakhwiVegetarian and non-vegetarianMain

Bamboo shoot boiled with berma, seasonal vegetables and a little chilli into a thin, sour, deeply savoury dish eaten over rice. It is the monsoon dish, made when the shoots are cut, and the clearest single example of how sourness rather than fat carries flavour here.

Awan bangwiAwan bangwiVegetarian and non-vegetarianMain

Rice cooked with seasonal vegetables and berma inside a wrapped leaf parcel and steamed, then opened at the table. A single-parcel meal designed to be carried to a field, and still made for festivals and for guests.

Wahan mosdengWahan mosdengNon-vegetarianSide

Pork, boiled and then chopped or minced fine, dressed raw with chilli, onion and coriander. The meat is cooked and the dressing is not, which gives it the sharpness of a salad and the weight of a meat dish at the same time.

Where to try: Mui borok restaurants in Agartala.

Mosdeng sermaMosdeng sermaNon-vegetarianCondiment

Tomato pounded raw with berma, dried red chilli and garlic into a coarse chutney. It appears at almost every hill meal, and it is the version of mosdeng most likely to be the first Tripuri thing a visitor actually enjoys.

Muya bai wahanMuya bai wahanNon-vegetarianMain

Bamboo shoot cooked with pork, and typically with jackfruit or green papaya to take up the fat. Muya is the shoot and wahan is the pork; almost every dish name in this kitchen is a list of what is in the pot.

Muya awandruMuya awandruNon-vegetarianMain

Bamboo shoot with rice flour and berma, cooked until the flour thickens the liquid into a porridge. The only thickened dish in the repertoire, and the one that shows most clearly what a cook does when there is no fat available to build a sauce with.

Kosoi bwtwiKosoi bwtwiNon-vegetarianMain

Beans stewed with berma. Bwtwi is the word for this kind of slow boiled stew, and the dish is named for whatever pulse or vegetable has gone into it — the naming convention is a shopping list, not a recipe title.

PachonVegetarianFestival dish

The Chakma dish of the Bizu new year — a mixed vegetable curry that must contain at least five different vegetables, and by preference many more, cooked together in one pot. It is made deliberately at the turn of the year to use up what the old year has left.

Fish in light gravyMacher jholNon-vegetarianMain

The plains staple — freshwater fish from a homestead pond or a tank fishery, in a thin turmeric and mustard-oil gravy with potato. It is the everyday meal of the western plain and shares its grammar with the delta on the other side of the ranges rather than with the hills twenty kilometres east.

Dried fishShutkiNon-vegetarianSide

Sun-dried fish cooked with onion, chilli and mustard oil. Drier and less fermented than berma, and the point at which the two kitchens are closest — a hill cook and a plains cook are both reaching for a preserved fish, and disagreeing only about how far to let it go.

Matabari peraVegetarianSweet

The milk-and-sugar prasad of the Tripura Sundari temple at Udaipur, made in a narrow lane of confectioners beside the temple and sold in leaf-lined baskets. It received a geographical indication in 2024 as Matabari Pera Prasad — a sweet whose registration is tied to a single temple rather than to a district.

Where to try: The pera shops immediately outside the Matabari temple, Udaipur.

Rice cakesPithaVegetarianSweet

Steamed and fried rice-flour cakes with coconut and jaggery fillings, made on the plain at the winter solstice and at Hangrai in the hills — the same object arriving from two directions at the same point in the calendar.