I fell in love with Assamese cuisine
It is India’s most well-kept secret. But it deserves to be mainstream.
A good friend of mine whom I know from high school visited us recently for a weekend. She currently lives in Southern California but is originally from the state of Assam located in the northeast of India. Similar to me she is also an Epicurean. We both live to eat. On this trip, she offered that she’d cook us her family recipe of a traditional Assamese dish.
As I talked about in my earlier post, I spent some of my early childhood in northeast India. I used to think I knew all the cuisines from that region and the influence of Chinese cuisine on the food. But while we were cooking together I realized how little I knew about Assamese cooking. And how different it was from what the rest of India labels as northeastern food. I also felt some amount of guilt too, knowing her all these years, I had not even once asked her about Assamese food.
Let’s talk about the dish we cooked. The main protein of the dish was pork belly. The other ingredients were onions, garlic, ginger, green chilies, tomatoes, lemon and salt.
Pop quiz: What is the main ingredient that is missing?
Hint: This is Indian food after all. If there is one thing that the world associates with Indian food, it is this ingredient.
Most of you must have guessed by now. Yes, the answer is Spices. There were no spices in this dish. Spending half my life in India and the other half in the United States and having experienced a lot of different cuisines from across India, I was shocked. How can a dish, that to a meat dish not use spices?
It was delicate, perfectly cooked, and delicious. And what really won me over was the simplicity of the ingredients that made the protein stand out. I made sure I paid attention while we were cooking. And requested her for the recipe to replicate the dish in the future. But this experience made me curious about what really is Assamese cuisine.
Doing some research I discovered that there are some important aspects that make Assamese cuisine stand out.
- First, simplicity: I already mentioned the lighter way of cooking. In addition to using minimal spices the cuisine also has minimal use of fire. This is similar to the stir-fry way of cooking popular in Southeast Asia. Also unlike the north Indian cooking, the dishes are not lavish and rich but simple yet packed with flavor.
- Second, the cuisine is a confluence of two cuisines: Hilly food that uses fermented, dried, pungent, and sour foods. And foods from the Assamese plains that include a lot of fresh vegetables, meat, and fish.
- Lastly, South East Asian influence: In addition to Chinese influence, the cuisine is also heavily influenced by Burmese and Thai cuisines.
During the research, I also discovered the extreme range of this cuisine. There are simple dishes that only use 2–3 simple ingredients but also exotic dishes using ingredients such as pigeons, water snails, silkworms, etc. According to this Blog, the two most popular dishes from that region are Khar and Tenga. Here is how the blog describes the dishes.
Khar
Khar is both an ingredient and the name of any dish prepared using it. This dish can be prepared with pulses, vegetables, or even fish or meat. The basic ingredient “Khar” is obtained by filtering out the liquid from a solution of water and dried, charred banana peel. This Assamese dish is unique in the sense that it preserves the alkaline or astringent taste of the Khar liquid.
Masor Tenga
The word “Tenga” in Assamese means sour. The favorite souring ingredients are tomatoes, dried mangosteen, lemon, raw mango, and elephant apple. The Masor Tenga is a lightly spiced, tangy fish curry best enjoyed with rice during lunch or dinner. Consumed during summertime, this dish is believed to enhance digestion after a heavy meal.
This experience reinforced that there is so much about food we don’t know. Every region of the world has unique foods to offer. Food from the northeast of India especially Assamese food deserves to be more mainstream and enjoyed by millions around the world.
Also, life is too short to not write about food.
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