There’s a slim chance you’ll come across the fine flavours of the hills of Uttarakhand, even at the best of North Indian restaurants.
Kumaoni food was born out of the need to combat harsh climatic conditions and low nutrition levels. It is a hardy cuisine that focuses more on what the body needs and less on what the tongue desires.
While Kumaon sees plenty of hikers and tourists, most go back without having tasted the flavours of the region.
With locals migrating to cities, the cuisine has remained confined to the kitchens of the depleting community of residents.
Namrata Rawat, a young researcher from Uttarakhand who is studying youth aspiration and migration in the state for development research at the University of Bonn in Germany, says, “Plummeting yield of indigenous foods and its decreasing profitability in the field have led to people moving to greener pastures. There is no one left to carry on the farming or master the cuisine from that produce; embracing traditional foods and promoting it via tourism is the way forward.”
The agrarian cuisine is heavily dependent on traditional grains such as ugal or buckwheat, and local millets such as madua, both of which are iron superfoods.
Lentils such as gehet, a variety of horse gram, and kidney beans or the pahadi rajma, are high in protein content, whereas black soybean, a local favourite, is steeped in iron properties by virtue of it being slow-cooked in iron woks.
When ground and cooked, it becomes the delectable dubka.
The same lentil, when simmered in ghee with red rice and millet flour, becomes bhat ka jaula, an iron and protein-heavy risotto type of dish, to be relished with garlic salt.
The primary cooking mediums are mustard oil and homemade clarified butter. Seasonal vegetables like lai (a local variety of mustard), horseradish leaves, mustard, cress, and wild ferns like lingda add the greens on the plate.
A variety of yams like gaderi make for great accompaniments or stand-alone dishes, just like the local hill lemon that is used in making a very popular winter snack, neembusaan.
Outside influences include Rajasthani vadis, turned here into the popular naalbadi, nuggets of sundried lentils and vegetables stored for use in curries, and finer ingredients of Awadhi cuisine that were woven into the affluent kitchens of the Shah families of Kumaon.
Meat preparations are eaten in the highest altitudes where greens are scarce, such as border areas where Tibetan influences gave birth to snacks like arija, a kind of sausage popular in the Rung community.
Bhutwa or offal curry and saan sun or marinated raw liver and goatskin are village favourites.
Over time, goat, sheep and lamb have merged into mainstream Kumaoni cuisine, finished off with simple puddings using rice or wheat with sugar and milk.
More than these components though, the key to Kumaoni flavours lies in its chief ingredient—local herbs only found in the higher Himalayas.
Jumbu, a variety of high-altitude chives, gindraini (Angelica glauca Edgew, a cross-cultural, Kumaon-Tibet herb), timur or wild schezwan pepper, and doona or garlic chives lead the fleet and steer the flavours of the ship.
Add doona to your paratha dough or temper a simple yellow dal with jumbu, and what you get is a dish heavy with piquancy unique to the hills.
The star addition is bhaang or cannabis seeds, the one ingredient that intrigues even those who wouldn’t give Kumaoni food a second thought.
The same dishes have a different adaptation and name across the region, but the essence of the cuisine lies in its distinct and sometimes pungent flavours.