Guwahati Assamese Food Trail

Assamese food surprises people arriving from the rest of India. Cream is rare and the base cooking carries almost no chilli heat; the flavour is built on alkalinity and sourness instead. The centre of it in Guwahati is a thali, and the thing worth knowing before you sit down is that it is meant to be eaten in a fixed order rather than grazed across. My position, and it is a position rather than a fact: this is home cooking before it is restaurant cooking, and the kitchens doing it properly are outnumbered by north Indian and Chinese ones, so a good Assamese plate here takes finding. Guwahati also holds a large Naga and wider Northeastern eating scene, which is excellent and is a separate cuisine. Mid-January is when the pitha get made, if the dates are yours to pick.

Eat the thali in order, because the order is the design. Khar first with rice, and it will taste strange the first time. Then the pitika and the vegetables, then the fish or meat, then the tenga, which resets the mouth. Curd and jaggery close it if anything does. This is not fussiness — a thali eaten in random order genuinely tastes worse. For breakfast, ask for jolpan by name: flattened, puffed or soaked rice with curd, cream and jaggery, sometimes in a bell-metal bowl called a baan bati. Nothing on the plate is heated and nothing is fried, and that is the point of it rather than an oversight. Where to eat is the harder question. Assam's tourism department puts its own ethnic-restaurant listing not in the central market blocks of Fancy Bazar and Paltan Bazar but in Ganeshguri, Beltola and Uzan Bazar — Gam's Delicacy in Ganeshguri is on that list for Assamese and Northeastern food. I would go at midday rather than late, but that is my preference and not a statement about anyone's kitchen hours. Around Magh Bihu in mid-January, chase pitha, and til pitha above all: bora rice flour rolled around black sesame and jaggery. It is genuinely seasonal, and the rest of the year you are eating the year-round approximation of it.

The distinctive thing about Assamese cooking is khar, and khar is a technique before it is a dish. Water is filtered through the ash of sun-dried, burnt banana peel or stem, and that alkaline liquid is used to cook raw papaya, ash gourd, radish, greens or pulses. Incredible India describes the result as carrying a smoky flavour; what registers first is a soft alkalinity found almost nowhere else in Indian cooking. It is the reason an Assamese meal opens with khar instead of closing with it — the convention is that it prepares the stomach for what follows, and the epithet khar khuwa Asomiya, khar-eating Assamese, comes from the same idea. At the other end sits tenga, the sour course, usually masor tenga: a thin fish curry soured with tomato, lemon, raw mango, dried mangosteen or the local elephant apple, and cooked with very little oil. Between the two come the pitika, vegetables or fish roasted or boiled and then mashed by hand with onion, ginger, green chilli and raw mustard oil. Salt and mustard oil are the two things a pitika cannot be made without, and the oil goes in uncooked. Whatever meat the household eats sits alongside, which in Assam often means duck or pork. The rice is its own subject. Joha, the aromatic Assamese rice, goes with meals. The sticky and semi-glutinous varieties, bora saul and kumol saul, go into jolpan, the soaked-rice breakfast eaten with curd, cream and jaggery, and into the pitha made at Magh Bihu.