Traditional recipes

Pounded pearl millet slow-cooked with moong dal into a thick porridge, eaten with ghee, jaggery or buttermilk in winter.

Thick pearl-millet flatbread patted by hand and baked on a tava or over a chulha, eaten with white butter, jaggery and greens.

Fresh bajra rotis crumbled with ghee and jaggery or shakkar, a simple sweet of Haryanvi farm homes.

A thin, tangy kadhi of sour buttermilk and gram flour, simmered long and tempered with fenugreek, eaten with rice or bajra roti.

Fresh green chickpeas cooked with a large bunch of green coriander, a winter vegetable dish of Haryana.

Small wild desert melons (kachri) cooked with spices into a tangy dry dish, a speciality of the sandy south and west of Haryana.

Tender cluster beans stir-fried with ajwain, garlic and spices, a common summer vegetable on Haryanvi tables.

The tender leaves of the gram plant cooked down with ghee, garlic and green chillies, a winter green of the Haryana countryside.

Red winter carrots cooked with fresh fenugreek leaves and simple spices, a quick dry vegetable dish.

A rustic flatbread of gram flour and wheat flour with onion, green chilli and spices, eaten with white butter and buttermilk.

Whole wheat roti kneaded with chopped bathua leaves and ajwain, a winter bread eaten with curd and white butter.

A thick, sweet whole-wheat roti made with jaggery and ghee, packed for journeys and field work.

Soft sweet pancakes of wheat flour and jaggery fried in ghee, made in Haryana for Teej and the rainy season.

Crisp, flaky fried discs of flour and ghee, sweet or salted, sent in the kothli gift for daughters at Teej.

Large, thick jalebis fried in desi ghee and soaked in sugar syrup, for which the town of Gohana in Sonipat district is famous.

A cooling summer drink of barley or bajra flour cooked and fermented in buttermilk, drunk in Haryanvi villages.

Thin, lightly salted buttermilk left after churning butter from curd, drunk with almost every meal in Haryana.

White butter churned by hand from set curd, then slowly cooked into fragrant desi ghee, the pride of every Haryanvi home.

A fiery pounded chutney of dried red chillies and garlic, eaten with bajra roti and white butter.

Fat red chillies stuffed with a mustard and fennel spice mix and sunned in mustard oil, a winter pickle.

Small, sweet cakes of bajra flour and jaggery with sesame, fried in ghee, eaten on cold winter days.

Rice cooked with jaggery, ghee, fennel and dry fruits into a sweet dish for festivals and village feasts.

Yellow pumpkin cooked with fenugreek seeds, amchur and jaggery into a sweet-sour dish, served with puri at village feasts.

Whole moth beans cooked into a thick, earthy dal tempered in ghee, a staple of the dry south-west of Haryana.