The grain is roasted before it is ground.
Eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand share one flood plain and a long history of needing food that keeps. The kitchen here is built on grain that has already been cooked once: roasted, parboiled, puffed or sun-dried, so that a meal can be put together without lighting a fire. The fat is mustard oil, not ghee. Bitterness is sought here rather than avoided, and the vegetarian cooking is austere by conviction as much as by economy.
Why it cooks as one zone
Bhojpuri, Magahi, Maithili and Nagpuri kitchens cook from one larder. What they have in common is the flood plain, and the state lines running across it make very little difference to what comes out of the pot. Lucknow is two hundred miles west and cooks nothing like this.
The move that defines the zone is processing the grain before it is needed. Gram is roasted and milled into sattu, a flour that is already food and needs only water. Rice is parboiled and rolled flat into chura, which softens in curd without heat, or puffed into muri. Lentils are ground, seasoned and dried on a roof into badi that will keep a year. Fuel was scarcer here than grain, and a larder you can eat without lighting anything is worth the labour it takes to build.
Where fire is used, it is often used without a pan. Litti are baked directly in the ash and embers of a dung or coal fire and cracked open at the table. The aubergine, tomato and potato for chokha go into the same embers, then get mashed with raw mustard oil and garlic. The blackened, split, ash-patched crust is what the method produces, and you should not cook around it.
Mustard oil is the fat, and using it raw is where much of the zone’s pungency comes from. Bitterness runs through the greens, the poppy seed and the karela, and nothing is done to soften it. Feeding crowds is its own culinary category here: bhandara food, cooked in vast pans at temples and festivals and given away, has its own dishes and its own proportions.
The pantry
The ingredients that make a dish belong to the Gangetic Heartland:
- Sattu, roasted gram milled to a flour that needs no cooking. Eaten as bread, as stuffing and as a drink.
- Mustard oil is the cooking fat, and poured raw over a mash or a bowl of curd it is the finish as well.
- Chura (flattened rice), parboiled and rolled flat, softened in curd rather than cooked.
- Urad badi. Ground lentil paste dried hard on a rooftop. Fry them until nutty before they go into a curry, or they stay chalky in the middle.
- Makhana, the puffed water-lily seed of the Mithila ponds, roasted for a snack or simmered into kheer.
- Poppy seed, ground for body and used whole for coating.
- Jaggery, worked into the dough of the sweets rather than poured over them.
- Sesame. Roasted and pounded with jaggery for the winter sweets.
- Parwal, the pointed gourd, fried as a vegetable and also hollowed and syruped as a sweet.
Where to find it
The difficulty with this list is grades and labels rather than availability.
In the UK, any South Asian grocer carries all of it. Sattu is sold as sattu or as roasted gram flour, and it is worth checking the label says roasted, because besan is raw and will not do. Chura is usually labelled poha; buy the thick grade. Makhana sits with the snacks, badi with the dried goods. Take mustard oil from the cooking-oil aisle rather than the pharmacy shelf, where it is still sold for external use. Parwal turns up fresh through the warmer months and frozen year-round.
In the US, Patel Brothers and the larger Indian grocers stock everything above, and makhana has crossed into health-food shops as fox nut. Deep and Laxmi for sattu and mustard oil, Swad for badi.
Rugra, the wild forest puffball of Jharkhand, has a season of about three weeks and does not travel. There is a substitute on the recipe that calls for it, and it is not the same thing.
The recipes
The everyday cooking of the plain, the dishes that mark a festival or a feeding, the street food of Banaras and Patna, the sweets of the winter fortnight, and the drinks.