The five rivers of the Punjab

Punjab is the Persian panj ab, the five waters: the Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas and Sutlej, which gather and run south-west to join the Indus. The land they drain is a broad alluvial plain, now divided between India and Pakistan, and its cooking is the cooking of a river country: wheat in the field, milk in the yard and a fire in every village.

The plain the five rivers have laid down is among the most fertile in Asia, and its character at table follows from it. Wheat is the staple grain, sown in the cool months and harvested in spring, and it reaches the table as roti, as the leavened naan of the tandoor and as the fried parathas of the morning. Rice is grown too, and the long-grained basmati Oryza sativa belongs to the northern foothills and plains, but in the Punjabi household the daily bread is wheat. Mustard Brassica juncea is the other great crop of the cold season. Its leaves are cooked down for sarson da saag and its oil is the old cooking fat of the region. What the rivers water also feeds the herd. Buffalo and cow milk supply the dairy on which Punjabi cooking leans: butter and ghee, dahi, lassi and paneer. The cooking of the plain is rich in these, and the character of its gravies, glossy with butter and cream, comes from the dairy as much as from the spice box. Kalra, in Prashad, writes as a cook of the Punjabi tradition, and his book is a record of how far that tradition reaches in the hands of the masters he gathers. The second pillar of the plain is the fire. The tandoor, a clay oven sunk or set in the ground and fed with charcoal or wood, is the instrument of the Punjabi table, and it works at a heat far beyond that of any domestic oven, in the region of 480°C (896°F) at the wall. Breads are slapped against its inner face; marinated meats, fish and paneer are skewered and hung in its heat. The village oven, shared by a lane, was the older form, and the tandoor house of the city grew from it. The dishes now spoken of as Punjabi in restaurants across the world, from tandoori chicken to dal makhani, took their shape in this meeting of the river plain and the clay oven. Partition in 1947 divided the five rivers between two states and moved families across the new line, and with them went the recipes of Lahore, Amritsar and Rawalpindi. Cooks who left the western Punjab carried the tandoor into Delhi and beyond, and the cooking of the plain became, in the second half of the century, the most widely recognised regional cooking of India. The land itself is the reason it endures: wheat, mustard, milk and a steady supply of water.

The Punjabi table is built on the contrast of the tandoor and the pot: bread and skewered meats from the clay fire, and slow gravies of onion, tomato, ginger, garlic and butter from the pan. Sarson da saag with makki di roti, cooked maize bread, is the cold-season meal of the plain, finished with white butter and eaten with jaggery or raw onion. Lassi, thick or thin, sweet or salted, is the drink of the field and the dhaba alike, and the glass of it is the proper close to a heavy meal.