Dishes

Saoji mutton rassaNon-vegetarianMain

Goat on the bone in a thin, dark, glossy gravy with a heavy skim of red oil, built on the poppy-seed and dry-coconut masala. The heat is peppery and cumulative rather than sharp, and it keeps building for several minutes after the plate is finished. Served with plain roti or bhakar and raw onion, and traditionally without a spoon anywhere near it.

Where to try: The savji khanavalis of Itwari, Mahal and Gandhibagh in Nagpur, at lunch.

Varhadi mutton rassaNon-vegetarianMain

The household style of the cotton plain — the same goat in a darker, drier masala of roasted coconut, sesame and a great deal of red chilli, with the gravy tighter than a saoji and the heat more frontal. Eaten with bhakar.

Varhadi kombdiकोंबडी रस्साNon-vegetarianMain

Country chicken in the Varhadi masala, cooked long enough for a bird that has walked. Weddings and harvest meals in the cotton districts are built around it, cooked outdoors in a large pot.

Tarri pohaVegetarianBreakfast

Nagpur's breakfast and its most distinctive single dish. Flattened rice steamed plain, then flooded at the counter with tarri — the spiced red oil skimmed off a pot of chana usal — with raw onion, coriander, lemon and a fistful of shev on top. Eaten standing, off a leaf plate, from about seven in the morning.

Where to try: The pavement counters around Sitabuldi, Mahal and Dharampeth in Nagpur.

Patodi rassaVegetarianMain

Set gram-flour diamonds simmered in a thin fiery gravy of onion, garlic, dry coconut and chilli. The vegetarian centrepiece of a Varhadi wedding meal, and the dish by which a Vidarbha cook is judged.

Zunka bhakarVegetarianMain

Gram flour cooked dry with onion, garlic and green chilli until it crumbles, eaten with jowar bhakar. The standing meal of the working day across the plain, and the cheapest complete protein a field kitchen can make.

Wada bhaatVegetarianMain

Urad-dal vadas served over plain rice with a thin dal poured across, an oil tempering and a lemon. A Varhadi festive and funeral dish both, and one of the few in the region where rice is the point in the western districts.

BharitVegetarianMain

Brinjal buried in embers until the skin blisters and the flesh collapses, peeled, mashed with onion, garlic, groundnut and green chilli. The Vidarbha version is hotter and less oily than Khandesh's, and it is made only with the large field brinjal grown for it.

Chana usal with tarriVegetarianMain

Whole black chana in a dark gravy, cooked in a large pot so the spiced oil separates on top. It is the parent dish of tarri poha and is eaten in its own right with pav.

Bamboo shoot curryवासोडाVegetarianMain

Fermented or dried bamboo shoot cooked with tamarind, a light masala and sometimes dried fish. Sour, faintly sulphurous and completely unlike anything cooked forty kilometres west. Available fresh only in the first weeks of the monsoon.

Chapda chutneyNon-vegetarianCondiment

Red weaver ants and their eggs pounded with salt, garlic and chilli, eaten with rice by Madia and Gond households in the eastern forests. The sourness is formic acid from the ants themselves. Gathered from nests built in tree canopies, and seasonal.

Chinnor bhaatVegetarianMain

Plain steamed rice of the short-grain aromatic Chinnor landrace grown in the Bhandara and Gondia tank country, eaten with a thin dal and ghee. The aroma is the entire dish, which is why nobody puts a masala near it.

Santra barfiVegetarianSweet

Milk solids cooked down with Nagpur mandarin juice and zest into a soft orange fudge. A twentieth-century sweet built on a nineteenth-century crop, and the thing every visitor to Nagpur is sent home with.

Where to try: The sweet shops of Sitabuldi and Itwari in Nagpur.

Thecha with Bhiwapur chilliVegetarianCondiment

Chilli, garlic and salt pounded on stone. Made here with the Bhiwapur chilli of southern Nagpur district, which holds a geographical indication and is valued for colour and pungency rather than for size.

MahuaVegetarianIngredient and drink

Dried mahua flowers eaten as they are, cooked into a coarse bread, boiled into a sweet gruel, or distilled. In the forest districts the March flowering is a working season with its own calendar and its own household economy.