Rajasthan and Gujarat

The cooking of Rajasthan and Gujarat belongs to the dry west of the subcontinent, from the Thar desert and the Aravalli hills across the Kathiawar peninsula to the long Gujarat coast on the Arabian Sea. Rajasthan was the country of the Rajput courts and the Marwari trading houses, and Gujarat that of the merchants and seafarers of the western ports; the two regions share a border, a long mercantile history and a strong vegetarian tradition, yet their tables differ sharply.

Rajasthan cooks within the limits of scarcity. Water was precious and fresh greens were few, so the kitchen came to rely on what keeps: dried lentils, gram flour, millets such as bajra, dried beans and the pods of the khejri tree, sun-dried vegetables, and ghee, yoghurt and buttermilk in place of water for cooking. Gram flour is the region's great resource, and it appears as gatte, steamed dumplings simmered in a yoghurt gravy; as kadhi; and as the sharp, dry-cooked pittore. Dal baati churma, in which hard baked wheat rounds are broken, soaked in ghee and eaten with spiced dal and a sweet crumbled churma, is the dish most often named for the region, and it suits a people who travelled and campaigned with little to hand. The meat cooking of Rajasthan belongs to the Rajput warrior households, who hunted and kept a table apart from that of the Marwari merchants, whose Jain and Vaishnava observance excluded meat altogether. Laal maas, a fiery mutton dish coloured and heated with dried red chillies of the region, and soola, meat grilled over embers, come from the first tradition; the second gave the kitchen its resourceful vegetarian repertoire, including ker sangri, a dish of desert berries and pods that is cooked in oil and spice and served with the dry breads of the region. The Jain prohibition on root vegetables such as onion and garlic, and the use of asafoetida Ferula assa-foetida in their place, shaped much of the trading communities' cooking in both states. Gujarat, by contrast, is a country of abundance in grain, groundnut, sesame and milk, and its cooking is known for a fine balance of sweet, sour and hot. Jaggery and sugar are used in dal and vegetable dishes alike, and the Gujarati thali, with its dal or kadhi, vegetable preparations, rice, flatbreads, farsan and a sweet, is among the most complete expressions of the vegetarian table. Sonal Ved, writing of the tiffin and the packed meal in Tiffin, gives the Gujarati lunchbox its due: the thepla, a flatbread of wheat flour with fenugreek leaves and spice, travels well for days, and the dhokla and khandvi, steamed preparations of fermented or set gram flour, are tempered with mustard seed and curry leaf Murraya koenigii and carried as everyday food. The farsan, the savoury snacks and fried or steamed light dishes, forms a distinct branch of Gujarati cooking, and the sweet shop is as important in Gujarat as in Rajasthan, where ghevar, a lattice disc of fried batter soaked in syrup, is made for the monsoon festival of Teej. Both regions have a tradition of sweets built on ghee, jaggery and flour, and the Rajasthani milk sweets of the desert towns and the Gujarati shrikhand, hung yoghurt sweetened and scented with saffron and green cardamom Elettaria cardamomum, belong to the same dairy culture. The divide between the two regions is thus one of land and observance more than of border. Rajasthan's food is dry, robust and preserved against hardship, built on gram flour, millet and chilli; Gujarat's is lighter, sweeter and more varied, built on a vegetarian grammar that the merchants carried with them to East Africa, Britain and North America. The Gujarati diaspora took the thepla, the farsan and the thali with it, and those dishes are now among the best-known of the subcontinent's travelling foods.

The taste of the west is set by the tempering: ghee or oil heated until cumin, mustard seed, asafoetida and dried red chilli sound and bloom before being poured over dal or kadhi. In Rajasthan the heat is that of dried red chilli and the sourness comes from yoghurt, dried mango powder and tamarind Tamarindus indica, while in Gujarat jaggery lifts the same dishes toward sweetness. A Gujarati thali is eaten in sequence, with the sweet often served alongside the savoury, and a Rajasthani meal ends with a dry bread and churma that has been drenched in ghee.