A worker grinds rice — one of many laborious steps involved in making harissa. When the harsh winters approach Kashmir, with temperatures falling sharply, most people prefer to stay indoors. It is only the craving for harissa that could compel anyone to get out of their cosy homes. Harissa is an authentic winter delicacy of Kashmir. This traditional mutton curry is usually eaten with a Kashmiri bread called tchot. Slow cooked over hours, the main ingredient of this textural dish is sheep or goat meat, cooked with short-grained rice and flavoured with spices such as fennel seeds, cinnamon and ..read more

Tender stalks of hurda ready to be roasted and threshed The sweet, nutty taste of freshly roasted tender jowar or sorghum is something I wait for throughout the year. Come winter, the season for hurda — as this tender jowar is called in Maharashtra — begins. Hurda connoisseurs make sure to find out where friends or organisers will be hosting parties in order to savour this seasonal delicacy. At hurda parties, usually hosted on farms, the roasted grain is enjoyed by the warmth of a campfire.    Jowar or sorghum is a millet which is a staple grain in many parts of Maharashtr ..read more

By Apoorva Sripathi Thengai poornam kozhukattais with a filling of coconut and jaggery. Photo courtesy of Apoorva Sripathi Consider the dumpling as universal. One of the oldest, and possibly the precursor of many dumpling shapes and varieties, mantou is said to have originated in China during its Warring States Period, where three kingdoms wrestled for control over the ancient country. Another story suggests it finds mention in the medicinal cookbook, A Soup for the Qan, written by Hu Sihui for the Yuan Dynasty. The dynasty is credited with having spread the mantou around their empire, and su ..read more

Text by Kavitha Yarlagadda Pootharekulu is not unlike a wafer biscuit in appearance. Photo courtesy: Fikana Foods I was eight when my neighbours, who hail from Rajahmundry in the state of Andhra Pradesh, gifted us a box of pootharekulu. That was my first experience of the confectionery, which is about the size of a wafer biscuit with many thin layers. When I bit into it, the sweet layers drenched in ghee and sugar melted in my mouth. The second time I ate it was when I was studying engineering in  Kakinada, a coastal city in eastern Andhra Pradesh. The paper-like delicacy made of rice fl ..read more

Text by Sugato Mukherjee The classic G&T is acquiring an Indian inflection. Photo courtesy: Museum Next; Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons In 1688, King James II was deposed from the throne of England during the Glorious Revolution — a bloodless coup that caused a seismic shift in the way England was governed. The new parliamentary regime introduced a series of amendments to the British constitution and legal system. The protectionist-style economic policy imposed hefty import duties on French wine and cognac, and tax holidays were simultaneously institut ..read more

Text and photographs by Sonia Sarkar Abdul Wadood’s Multani sohan halwa In 2006, one of my paternal aunts living in Kolkata, whom I fondly call Mejo pishiya, asked me to get her halwa sohan from Delhi. Despite being deeply absorbed in the city’s culture for over two years by that point, I must confess that I had never heard of halwa sohan before. When I asked around, my colleagues directed me to Ghantewala, an 18th century confectioner in the city’s Chandni Chowk area, about 200 metres away from the historic Red Fort.  “They make the best sohan halwa,” I remember my colleague saying.&nbs ..read more

Text and photographs by Sharanya Deepak  The arid landscape of Marwar, Rajasthan  When Devi Devasi first saw the plane that brought supplies during a great spell of hunger, she was afraid that it would come shuttling down on her small head. She recounted the day to me on a warm July afternoon in her village, and drew an accurate silhouette of a plane with a stick on the mud floor where we sat.  “It was so big, have you seen one up close?” she asked me. “And we were so hungry. Hunger makes a man smaller than he already is.” Devi’s village is outside Jodhpur, one of the largest ..read more

Text and photographs by Sharanya Deepak  Mounds of dried jowar (or sorghum) husk in Palasani, Rajasthan  Rajasthan is India’s largest state. It scales the country’s northwest and crawls through the mighty Thar desert, which consists of the state’s primary landscape of formidable sand dunes, terse, rocky hills and brazen, pink skies. The Thar begins in India, but stretches across borders that were hastily drawn during India’s independence and the subsequent partition into Punjab and Sindh in Pakistan. The oft-uttered, true cliché about the Indian subcontinent being a place of astoun ..read more

Text by Simi George  Photographs by Donnie George and Nadackal family The perfect appam presents a contrast of textures. The ishtoo, typically made of goat or chicken, is delicately flavoured. Growing up in Delhi, chocolate eggs were all I wanted for Easter. Instead, my mother made appams. I’ve often seen appams categorised as pancakes. However, I consider this an unjust demotion. No pancake has ever called for the commitment needed to make a decent appam.  Beloved among the Nasrani Christians of India, appams require just a handful of ingredients — raw rice, grated coconut or cocon ..read more

Text by Fehmida Zakeer Centella asiatica or gotukola is a wild plant that is widely eaten in several Asian cuisines. Photo courtesy: Shruthi Tharayil A few years ago, Shruti Tharayil was in the south Indian state of Telangana, documenting stories about women farmers for an NGO, when she noticed the women plucking wild plants and taking them home to cook. She was surprised because her perception until then had been that wild plants were inedible. However, when she spoke to the farmers, she learned that many uncultivated plants or weeds growing between cultivated plants, were actually nutritiou ..read more