Maize, buckwheat and ghee

The pahari plate looks like the oldest food in the country: a flat bread, a lentil, a green, and a bowl of something sour. It reads as continuity — the same dinner that has been eaten on the same terraces for a thousand years. Two of its staples are imports, and the newer of the two is roughly as old as the railway. What is actually ancient here is the technique and the fat, and the technique survived by being indifferent to which grain it was working with.

What is on the plate

The hill kitchen is built on three things and each has a job. Mandua, finger millet, is the everyday grain of the middle hills: small, hard, high in calcium, and ground into a flour that will not roll. Jhangora, barnyard millet, is the substitute for rice — a small-seeded grass that yields on stony soil and makes a soft, faintly sweet gruel. Kuttu, buckwheat, is the high-altitude crop and the fasting crop, ground into a dark flour and eaten as a bread when the rules forbid wheat. Add ghee, and a little of whatever is fermented or dried, and you have the whole system.

The nineteenth-century arrival

Maize is American, and it reached India by the Portuguese route in the sixteenth or seventeenth century — the dates are argued, the direction is not. But it became a crop of the plains first, and it climbed into the western Himalaya only in the nineteenth century, carried by roads, by revenue settlement and by the fact that a colonial administration wanted a grain that could be taxed in a fixed quantity. Within two generations it had taken the summer slot on the terraces, and in many villages it had taken the plate.

Why maize won is not mysterious once you look at what it replaced. Mandua and jhangora are small-seeded. They are threshed under cattle, beaten by hand to loosen the husk, winnowed, and then ground; the dehusking is the expensive part, and it is done by women, in the hours that are not otherwise accounted for. One field study in Uttarakhand put the whole chain at about fifteen hours of labour per fifty kilograms for mandua, and about twenty-nine for jhangora — a figure that farmers gave from memory and that matches what the work looks like.

Maize needs none of that. The cob dries on the plant, the grain comes off with a thumb, and it can be boiled whole, roasted green, or ground at a mill. It also yields more per hectare under rainfed conditions than any millet, which matters on a terrace where the soil is thin and the monsoon is unreliable. The millet did not lose on nutrition, where it wins, or on taste, where it is at least equal. It lost on the hours.

The cost nobody counted

There is a price for that substitution and it took about two generations to appear. Maize is a good source of calories and a poor source of available niacin, and where it replaced a mixed basket and the pulse went with the millet, pellagra followed — the disease of maize-dependent diets, recorded in India in the early twentieth century among populations that had made the same switch. The crop had travelled without its correction: in Mesoamerica the grain is soaked in lime or ash before it is ground, which frees the niacin, and that step did not come with the seed. The hill kitchen's answer was to keep the legume and the green, which is why the plate still has gahat and bhatt and a dozen wild greens on it, and why the substitution was survivable.

Buckwheat, the other import

Kuttu is not a wheat and not a cereal. It is a knotweed, and both species grown in the Himalaya came from outside — one from southwest China, one from Central Asia — and travelled in with trade rather than with conquest. Its virtues are narrow and decisive: sixty to ninety days from sowing to harvest, tolerance of poor soil, growth up to about three thousand metres, and a habit of ripening in the gap where the monsoon has failed and everything else has given up. That is why it became the grain of the bad year, and then the grain of the fasting day, and then — in the last twenty years — the grain of the health-food shelf in Delhi.

The sequence matters. Buckwheat was never the hill's everyday bread; it was the insurance. Insurance crops get eaten when the main crop fails, which is why they acquire ritual status: the fasting calendar preserves a set of dishes that people once ate because there was nothing else. When the famine risk went away, the ritual remained, and the grain became expensive precisely because nobody needs it.

The fat that stayed

Ghee is the third term and the least discussed. It is butter with the water and the milk solids removed, which makes it shelf-stable for a year at room temperature without a jar, a refrigerator or a preservative. In a hill household with one cow, a churn and no cold store, that property is the difference between having a fat in March and not having one. It also carries flavour in a way oil cannot, because the heating that clarifies it also browns the milk solids first, and those browned notes go back into the finished fat.

This is the real continuity on the plate. The grain changed twice in two hundred years, the pulse changed less, and the fat did not change at all — because the fat was never about taste in the first place, it was about keeping. A cuisine can swap its staple and remain recognisably itself, so long as the fat and the technique hold. That is the pillar's argument, seen from the top of a hill.

What the grain does now

Nationally, the crop that took the terraces has left the kitchen. India grows thirty-five to thirty-eight million tonnes of maize and about sixty per cent of it goes to poultry and dairy feed; another fifteen per cent went to ethanol in 2023–24, up from roughly one per cent two years earlier. The grain that fed the hills now feeds chickens and fills fuel tanks, and the price the hill farmer gets is set by a poultry industry and an ethanol mandate rather than by a village market.

Meanwhile the millets have come back as a premium product. Mandua and jhangora are now sold in cities as heritage grains at prices that the households who kept growing them cannot pay, and the state promotes them under a superfood label while the terraces that grew them go out of cultivation because there is nobody left to do the fifteen hours. The irony is not that the grain was rediscovered. It is that it was re-priced, and that the people who kept it alive through the years when it was worth nothing are now the ones who cannot afford it.

This is entry 10 of Food in About India. The pillar's argument — grain and fat, not spice blends — is set out on the pillar page.