Traditional Cuisine of Indian States: Famous Dishes and GI Foods

Food is one of the easiest scoring corners of art and culture, because the question is almost always a straight pair: a dish and the state it belongs to, a festive sweet and the festival it is made for, or a food product and the state whose Geographical Indication it carries. This note collects the famous dishes of the Indian states region by region, along with the terms examiners like to test, such as Wazwan, Sadya, Mahaprasad, Dham and dum pukht.

North India and the hills

Kashmiri cooking rests on mutton, dried fruit, curd and the mild spices of the valley. Its ceremonial banquet is the Wazwan, a meal of many courses, traditionally said to run to thirty six, cooked by a hereditary chef called the Waza under a head cook known as the Vasta Waza. It is eaten four persons to a plate from a large copper platter called the trami, and its known courses are rogan josh, rista, gushtaba, tabak maaz and the winter preparation harissa. Punjab gives the country makki di roti with sarson da saag, Amritsari kulcha, chole bhature, pinni and lassi, and the tandoor from which tandoori roti and tandoori chicken come. Haryana is a dairy and millet kitchen of bajra khichdi, kadhi pakora, bathua raita, singri ki sabzi and churma. In Himachal Pradesh the festive meal is the Dham, served by cooks called botis, with madra, chha gosht and siddu beside it. Uttarakhand has kafuli, chainsoo, phaanu, bhang ki chutney, aloo ke gutke and the sweet bal mithai of Almora. Uttar Pradesh carries the Awadhi tradition of Lucknow, famous for dum pukht, slow cooking in a sealed pot, and for the galouti and kakori kebabs, sheermal and biryani; Agra is known for petha and Mathura for peda. Ladakh, a cold desert, eats skyu, chhutagi, thukpa and butter tea.

Western India

Rajasthan cooks for a dry land, using dried vegetables, gram flour and ghee in place of fresh produce: dal baati churma, gatte ki sabzi, ker sangri, laal maas, the mawa kachori of Jodhpur and the Jaipur sweet ghevar, eaten at Teej. Gujarat is largely vegetarian and lightly sweet, with dhokla, khandvi, thepla, fafda jalebi, the dabeli of Kutch and the winter mixed vegetable undhiyu of Surat. Maharashtra runs from the street food of Mumbai, vada pav, misal pav and pav bhaji, to puran poli, shrikhand, pithla bhakri, the red and white rassa of Kolhapur and the Konkan drink solkadhi; modak is its offering at Ganesh Chaturthi. Goa keeps its Portuguese inheritance in vindaloo, sorpotel, xacuti and the layered sweet bebinca, and its spirit feni is distilled from cashew or coconut. Madhya Pradesh is known for the poha jalebi and bhutte ka kees of Indore, for dal bafla, and for the korma and seekh kebabs of Bhopal.

The southern states

Tamil Nadu is the home of idli, dosa, sambar, rasam and filter coffee, of the peppery Chettinad cooking of the Nagarathar community, and of pongal, which is both a harvest festival and the rice and lentil dish made at it. Kerala cooks with coconut and rice: appam with stew, puttu with kadala curry, avial, karimeen pollichathu, the Thalassery biryani of the Malabar coast, and the Sadya, a vegetarian feast served on a banana leaf at Onam and ending in payasam. Karnataka gives bisi bele bath, ragi mudde, neer dosa, the Mysore masala dosa, Mysore pak and Dharwad pedha, besides the Udupi tradition of temple cooking. Andhra Pradesh and Telangana keep the hottest of the southern kitchens, with gongura pachadi, pulihora, pesarattu, bagara baingan, the paper thin sweet pootharekulu of Atreyapuram, and in Hyderabad the biryani, haleem, double ka meetha and qubani ka meetha of the Nizam's table.

Eastern India and the Northeast

Bengal eats in courses and closes with sweets: shukto, machher jhol, shorshe ilish, kosha mangsho and luchi, then rosogolla, sandesh, mishti doi and the winter sweets made with date palm jaggery. Odisha has dalma, pakhala bhata, chhena poda and rasabali, and the Mahaprasad of the Jagannath temple at Puri, cooked in stacked earthen pots and sold in the Ananda Bazaar. Bihar is known for litti chokha with sattu, the thekua made at Chhath, dal pitha and the khaja of Silao; Jharkhand for dhuska, chilka roti, the mushroom rugra and the rice drink handia. Assam cooks with the alkali khar and the sour fish curry masor tenga, and makes pitha at Bihu. Nagaland smokes pork and cooks it with bamboo shoot and the fermented soybean axone, with the king chilli for heat; Meghalaya has jadoh and dohneiiong; Manipur eromba, singju and the black rice chak hao; Mizoram bai and smoked pork; Tripura the fermented fish berma in its mui borok dishes; Arunachal Pradesh thukpa, zan and the rice beer apong; and Sikkim momo, thukpa, phagshapa, the fermented greens gundruk and the millet drink tongba.

State and dish at a glance

Foods that carry a Geographical Indication

A Geographical Indication ties a product to the place it comes from, and a good number of Indian foods hold one. Darjeeling tea of West Bengal was the first Indian product registered under the Geographical Indications of Goods Act of 1999. Hyderabadi haleem received its tag in 2010. Among the others worth remembering are Bikaneri bhujia of Rajasthan, Dharwad pedha of Karnataka, Tirupati laddu of Andhra Pradesh, Banglar rosogolla and Joynagarer moa of West Bengal, Silao khaja of Nalanda district in Bihar, Ratlami sev of Madhya Pradesh, pootharekulu of Andhra Pradesh, Goan feni, the chak hao black rice and the kachai lemon of Manipur, and the Naga king chilli. The tag protects the name, so haleem cooked elsewhere may not be sold as Hyderabadi haleem.

Festival dishes and cooking terms

Examiners also ask which dish goes with which occasion. Modak is made for Ganesh Chaturthi in Maharashtra, puran poli for Holi and Gudi Padwa, gujiya for Holi in the north, thekua for Chhath in Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh, ghevar for Teej in Rajasthan, pitha for Bihu in Assam, sel roti for Tihar in Sikkim and the hills, and payasam at the Onam Sadya. Of the cooking terms, dum pukht is slow cooking in a sealed pot, bhuna is frying the spices and meat before the liquid goes in, tadka is the final tempering of spices in hot fat, and a thali is a plated set meal, of which the Rajasthani, Gujarati and Bengali versions are the best known.