By Carleton Cole
Northern India serves up great versions of the substantial, often plain but occasionally overpowering cuisine from the roof of the world
While top chefs through the ages have created delicacies with grain, vegetable and livestock, their Tibetan counterparts have found sustenance from two of the few life forms hardy enough to survive on the roof of the world: yaks and barley.
Besides being well designed for severe cold with thick layers of protection, the sturdy bovines and grain are ideally suited to the traditionally nomadic Tibetan lifestyle.
Take the quintessential Tibetan dish, tsampa, in which unhusked, sun-dried barley is pounded and roasted before being wadded into lumps and dipped in yak butter. This dish is traditionally taken with Tibetan tea, a frothy, salty beverage in which the flavour of tea leaves – and any possible sense of “tea” as it is known anywhere else – drowns in a bog of yak butter emanating a pungent aroma rivalling even that of durian.
Barley is also made into flour for bread and noodles, including thukpa, a substantial, nourishing Tibetan noodle soup with vegetables and cilantro, as well as the bland tsampa porridge, which can be smoothly satisfying with a bit of sugar or honey.
Local varieties of such fare fuel Tibetan settlers and refugees as well as tourists through much of northern India, including in the restaurants and guesthouses of Sikkim and northern West Bengal.
Customers at these small, family-owned establishments can see the rustic cuisine being prepared. While bread bakes and tea steams, chefs chop vegetables on thick cutting boards, as blue gas flames fire up at double boilers steaming Tibetan cuisine’s tastiest speciality: momo (dumplings).
Beneath skins made from barley-flour, these dim-sum-like potstickers trap the flavours of yak or other meat, minced vegetables, ginger and even some tangy yak cheese. The skins are then folded and pinched together to form crescents or balls, which can be fried or steamed. Momo are eaten with soy sauce or a delicious orange home-made chilli sauce, which rather than adding spice, soothes in a mild way. Warm ting momo – steamed bread – is ideally paired at breakfast with milk tea.
Momo are one of the few complicated Tibetan dishes, and many places either specialise in them or don’t bother at all, while others don’t always prepare them. “Well, yes, we have momo, but not now – it takes so long to prepare,” offers a waiter in a restaurant with momo varieties listed on the menu. “Oh no, we don’t do momo. You have to get up too early to make the dough,” explains a guest-house/restaurant owner.
After sampling consistently excellent momo for days in places like Lhasa Kitchen and Everest Restaurant in the Indian hill stations of Darjeeling and Kalimpong, the best dumplings in the region were found at the Snow Lion Restaurant in Sikkim’s capital of Gangtok. Softer dough and deeper flavour due to more finely chopped vegetables – and a greater variety – give these momo the edge.
In an upset of sorts, tied for second place are the have-a-go-at-everything Bengali-run restaurants like the Super Soft Parlour in Darjeeling and the Kalash Vegetarian Snacketeria in Kalimpong.
Instead of a shrine to the Dalai Lama and a map of Tibet, these places display listings of Indian, Continental and Local Specialties on offer – not exactly an indication of authentic cuisine. Yet they do wonderful momo enhanced by lots of ginger.
Jazzing up the basic Tibetan palate with even greater success are the people of Sikkim and Bhutan, who in warmer climes can grow more vegetables – and even rice.
Rivalling Indian basmati or Thai jasmine is the underrated red rice of Bhutan and Sikkim. Unhusked and full of nutrients, this earthy-flavoured grain provides a more adaptive base than tsampa for Tibetan- and Chinese-style meals. Vegetables like carrots, peas and spinach, plus herbs, lightly fried and spiced in oil, go perfectly with red rice. They also taste good with the thin noodles of the commonplace Sikkimese version of the classic Chinese noodle dish, chowmein.
A culinary highlight of the Eastern Himalayas is the Bhutanese cuisine served in Cloud 9, Kalimpong. The boutique hotel’s owner, Binod Yonzone, apart from having painted the landscapes on the walls, also cooks some of the region’s best versions of what he modestly calls “hill food”. Among his specialities are a mild vegetable Bhutanese curry and a filling potato and cheese dish, both of which are eaten with red rice.
But lest one forget the unrefined foundations of Tibetan-influenced Himalayan fare, evenings and special occasions are a time for tall – really tall – jugs of chang, an intoxicating brew flavoured by fermented barley. While the drink itself is legal, its preparation techniques do not always meet that definition in the villages of western Sikkim. When asked if there was any chang in town, one Nepalese-Sikkimese guest-house owner replied casually: “Sure, I can arrange it for you.” He led the way to a speakeasy of sorts, which offers takeaway orders of the surreptitious spirit. “This way avoids regulations and hassles from the police.”
While utterly bland when ground into tsampa, barley grains metamorphose into little red monsters in chang, which throttles the taste buds with an incredibly sharp, fiery twang similar to but stronger than rice wine. The brew is drunk through a bamboo straw with thin slits designed to send up the liquid but not the bloating barley. A 25-centimetre-tall wooden jar of chang is best followed by lots of water, sleep, and a hearty breakfast the next morning.
