Meal in the Hills - Mawpdai, Part 2

Meal in the Hills - Mawpdai, Part 2

After driving for most of the day, we finally arrived at Mawpdai well after dark (thanks to Bagan time), and were fairly tired and hungry. Since my objective was to understand their traditional food habits, we had requested our hosts to prepare a simple meal for us, something they would routinely eat at home. But of course, they got a bit carried away, and decided to show off the culinary bounty their cozy little village had to offer…

Bah Joy had called in some cousins to help cook the meal, and so along came Bah Strongman and Bah Lastborn (no prizes for guessing his position in the litter!).

After welcoming us, Bah Joy showed us around his simple but spacious home. Like most homes in the region, this one also had two distinct segments: one was the living space with the hall and bedrooms, and the other – in a separate building – had the kitchen. The sparse but spacious kitchen had a countertop running along two sides, and all the cooking happened in an elevated wood-fired alcove built into the third wall; the dining table took up the fourth wall.

The kitchen

Bah Strongman handling the hearth, and Bah Lastborn sitting on the floor, grating raw papaya

For the meal that day, nearly all the ingredients came from within a 100-meter radius of the house. And talk about fresh ingredients –- we ourselves helped pick most of the herbs and vegetables just minutes before starting to cook them. Within the compound of their home were enough different edible plants to enjoy a colourful diet throughout the year!

Horclap leaves, junglee dhaniya leaves, and two varieties of chili - the ghost chili and the bird's eye

The wall stones by the entrance of the compound had wild greens sprouting up from between them – from here we plucked some horclap and jangew leaves for salad.

Jahprodoh, another wild green herb we picked

Then we went around to the side of the house and plucked a raw papaya for another salad. Then into the backyard to pluck still more herbs and roots. We slowly made our way right around the house, picking herbs and greens as we fancied, deciding the menu as we went. Bah Joy kept rattling off the names of all the greens we were picking, and I had a tough time keeping up with my notes and pictures.

Along the way, Bah Joy stopped to show me a small, almost non-descript wild plant sprouting at the base of a tree. I thought it was a weed. But few wild plants are considered weeds in these regions, where people understand and value the local flora. This little plant was actually junglee dhaniya or wild coriander, a plant from a completely unrelated family but with almost the exact same flavour and aroma profile as the fresh coriander leaves we eat in our urban homes! We picked a liberal bunch of these leaves to make a fresh green spicy chutney.

Junglee dhaniya growing along the wall of the house

The backyard itself was bursting with plants growing in untamed freedom. There were various gourds, tubers and yams, tamarillos, several varieties of chilies, and several other plants that I could not even begin to identify.

Bah Joy proudly showed us a fallen tree stump in a damp corner of the backyard, which he called the ‘mushroom tree’. During the long monsoons prevalent in this region, the entire log and the soil around it blooms with different kinds of mushrooms, most of which are edible. How fantastic! A supply of edible wild mushrooms, literally from your backyard!

The 'mushroom tree' - a stump of wood on which wild mushrooms grow in the wet months of monsoon

In my various visits to rural kitchens over the years, I am constantly reminded of a culinary skill that is almost forgotten in urban areas – the art of using every non-toxic part of a plant as food. In Meghalaya, the use of waang, the stem of the yam plant, is a perfect example of this. While the use of the root is known, the stem itself can also be used in several different ways: mashed and added to curries, chopped up and stir fried with spices, diced for salads… In Mawpdai, we used it along with tungtap, a kind of fermented fish, to make a chutney. In some of the other villages I visited, I had waang in other preparations as well, but more on that later.

Also on the menu that evening was a traditional chicken broth. And like all the vegetable ingredients we had picked, the meat too, was to be just as fresh! Before we knew it, our host was off to find one of his chickens. The closest one was found perched on the neighbor’s roof, eyes almost closed in post-prandial reverie, blissfully oblivious to its impending fate. Within minutes, Bah Joy made a quick-fix lasso with a stick and some string, reached up and gently slipped the noose over the chicken’s head, and yanked it down from its perch.

Bah Joy with his chicken

The only ingredients that were not from the yard were the potatoes, the onions and the rice, none of which grows in this part of Meghalaya. Those ingredients were sourced from the weekly haat at Balat, a town along Meghalaya's border with Bangladesh.

Once all the ingredients were so gathered, the dinner preparations were a blur of activity. Our host and his two friends got busy boiling potatoes, cleaning the herbs and greens, chopping onions, stripping and boiling the waang stem…

That evening, for the first time, I also saw a chicken being slaughtered and plucked for my meal, right in front of my eyes. I saw it go from a clucking, frenzied bird running around the kitchen to a heap of clean white pieces of meat in a matter of minutes. Quite a sight for the meat eater in me…

It was interesting to observe that all three people preparing our meal were men. The women, meanwhile, were out in the village or in neighboring villages, doing business in their small corner shops!

An hour and a half of tireless cooking later, the feast was laid out for us. On the menu:

- The most minimalistic and yet the most delicious chicken broth I’ve ever tasted

- A horclap and mashed potato mixture rolled into small bite sized lumps

- A jangew salad

- A raw papaya and neilieh seeds salad

- A junglee dhaniya chutney, freshly made on a flat grinding stone

- The waang and tungtap chutney (my absolute favoutire item of this meal, and perhaps of all the meals on the trip -- except for a few pork dishes, but again, more on that later)

- And of course, all held together by the ubiquitous sticky white rice!

Accompaniments included large wedges of the local sohjew lime, sliced raja mircha or ghost chilies, bird's eye chilies, and simple salt.

The feast!

Our lovely hosts and I, on the porch between the living room and the kitchen

Feeling a bit sheepish about all the time and effort that had gone into serving us this feast, but at the same time immensely grateful for the experience and knowledge I gained, we finally sat down with our hosts, and relished the meal. And what a meal it was! Much, much tastier than any food one could get at a restaurant serving North Eastern cuisine here in Bangalore!! A must-have if you ever go to Meghalaya, I tell you. Get in touch and I’ll give you Bah Joy’s and Bah Kras’s numbers, and the secret location of Mawpdai!