Fit for a King

I had the good fortune yesterday to be invited to a Newar feast, and the intestinal fortitude (despite recent events, see below) to live to tell about it and even to eat some breakfast the next morning.
I arrived in Patan late afternoon, with unseasonable rains threatening to damage the maturing rice crop and flood the imminent festival of Dashain. It had been a long day of navigating the sodden city both on foot and folded into tiny tin buses, newly purchased fabrics clutched tightly about me, but I arrived at my friend's friend's house cheerful. And hungry. As a perpetual guest in this culture, ironically enough, true hunger is rarely something you'll experiece, but there it was. That nervous twinge emanating from an empty belly. And ironically again, we had to wait. There were friends to meet, then more friends, all Patan Newars, and by the time we were all heading to eat it was nearly dark. Mind you I had another dinner to attend, on the other side of town, with an American expat couple I'd been dying to meet--but somehow here I was, hours later than I'd expected, suddenly a welcomed guest at a traditional feast. There was no escape, nor could I really have wished for one, so a phone call later I let myself settle in for the duration.
Before I get to the point--which is the food, of course--I need to make one more digression and explain that this bhoj ( feast) was traditional in a self-conscious sense. It was billed as such, on the tourist-priced Rs. 300 tickets. The whole festival of which it was a part was contrived as some combination of fundraiser and cultural exhibition; all the narrow brick or cobble streets around Patan Durbar Square were filled with Newars of various castes demonstrating their traditional trades, from pounding baji (flattened rice) by hand (nowadays there are machines that do this), to making and hand-firing bricks and tiles, to distilling liquor. There was one area where the entire year's worth of festivals were represented by their distinctive iconography and ritual foods, one after another, on tables around a courtyard. Step over here and it's midwinter, yomari punhi, and eat this sesame-and-molasses filled treat (the yomari) to warm your insides; over here come try this millet beer that the Newar farmers drink on X month. . . it was all fascinating and beautiful to see--this sort of rich cultural elaboration on the ties between season, ritual and food was what drew me back to Kathmandu and formed the basis for my original Fulbright research proposal. But you have to wonder what it means when a cultural group feels the need to put itself on display, or, one might even say, to sell itself. As the Newari man sitting next to me said later at dinner, 'now our culture is less than 25 percent.' I.e. people are no longer making handmade bricks on a daily basis, but they haven't yet forgotten how. There's a sense that these traditions are valuable, both priceless and yet somehow priceable. But back to the feast.
Our tickets purchased, we entered a courtyard and we're Tika'd with vermillion paste and rice, garlanded with red ribbons. Not three step further on a woman thrust little clay dishes of the notoriously strong Newar raksi upon us, along with a large green leaf-plate (i'm a little embarassed, as an amateur ethnobotanist, not know what kind of leaf it was) containing a 3-inch round urad daal pancake topped with unbelievably tasty "buff" (water buffalo meat). The warm-up to the warm-up. We were ushered over to some plastic tables under a tarp. Now chhang--cloudy, tart, slightly sweet rice beer--came in clay vessels one size up from those used for raksi, and a dish of spicy daikon and cucumber achar appeared. What an appetizer! Light, crunchy, and absolutely packed with flavors. What spices, I wanted to know? I counted off the usual suspects: fenugreek? yes. Turmeric? of course. Garlic? that was obvious enough? Cumin, coriander, onion, ginger . . .? yes to all of the above. And of course plenty of chillies. And a small round green thing--vegetable or spice I don't know--whose name was lost in the delicious shuffle. I thought the meal had begun, but no, this was mere child's play, something to accompany the drinks. (I now had another little dish of raksi alongside my chhang). It was now dark, and we moved over to a long table set with metal plates. In good weather we'd have been sitting on long mats on the floor, in long rows facing each other. Now began the processon proper: first the most strictly ritual foods, as far as I understand it, the Samay Baje: a pile of flattened rice (Np chiura, Nw baji) surrounded by little bits each of ginger pickle, black soybeans, a small cube of raw pumpkin, delicate, stemmy mustard greens in mustard oil, and an unidentifiable but memorable achar. I'm already forgetting something, I know it, but there's a time and a place for field notes: this was a time to eat. I followed the lead of my neighbors and set aside the pumpkin piece and a tiny bit of everything else next to my plate--for what deity I know not, in the rich and baffling multi-traditional pantheon of the Newars. Then we tucked in. I barely had time to appreciate the unique savor of each dish before two more appeared, as a line of servers doled out delicacy after delicacy with relentless efficiency. I began to understand the second half of the saying "parbate bigriyo mojle, newar bigriyo bhojle," which translates roughly to "hill Nepalis are ruined by sex, Newars by feasting." It rhymes in Nepali. Anyway, between incredulous mouthfuls of baji flavored with spicy stewed chicken (the British fiction of 'curry' doesn't get us anywhere as far as description goes), cauliflower tarkari, and fragrant, soupy white peas, I caught on from my neighbor's enthusiastic commentary somethig of the set order to all this, the method to the madness. I quickly realized I would have to refuse categorically any offers of seconds of any one dish to have any hope of saving face, trying everything and cleaning my plate at the end. A Newari phrase appeared out of the ether: ghataa, enough! The servers crinkled the corners of their eyes in amusement and gave me little dollops whenever I blinked. There must have been 20 dishes. I remember buff meat; potato and bamboo shoots; something red and very spicy; another incarnation of the daikon achar; assorted buffalo entrails prepared dry (I identified my three little morsels as liver, tripe, ear); another spicy meat broth or other; and raksi. Most everything was perfumed with mustard oil, in which a trace of red onion was fried to a crisp brown. Fenugreek, chillies, turmeric, always. But more subtle permutations of spice, too, mysteries to unravel. At one point a glistening round gulab jamun (a classic Indian sweet, Newar by extension?) was dolloped aboard, "to protect the liver" after the raksi--while the raksi aids in the digestion of the heavy meats, helps the diverse clientele in the bar of the stomach mingle without resentment or mutual suspicion. Nice. At long last, after my world had been focused down to a brass plate and an endless mingling of colors and flavors, came the gentle winding down. A sour, sulphury-salty red broth fell from the sky, lip-smacking after all the preceding richness. Another soupy item, too, bitter and aromatic stewed fenugreek seeds doled out by the tablespoonful or so. Then a scant teaspoon of sprouting raw mung beans, I think they were, and finally a flourish of thick, sweet yogurt. Digestive upon digestive ensuring the continuing health and capacity for gluttony of a people that have attained the status of culinary genius; Ayurvedic principles applied rather perversely, in order to enable otherwise unthinkable levels of consumption. This was truly a feast, of a magnitude I'd never experienced, medieval, almost, in its proportions.
On top of it all I swilled the last of my raksi alongside my compatriots--we were all damn friendly by this point--and ate my gulab jamun with an inward wink at my liver. Handwashing in the dark, much back-clapping and joking, a rare cigarette to celebrate the occasion and give final impetus to my digestive process. Out into the night, in a taxi who's driver had apparently never left the confines of his native Patan--I shouted directional queries out the window at bicyclists and, once in familiar territory, navigated with growing confidence to the house of the American couple. I was only an hour and a half late in the end, quite wthin reason given the circumstances. Their dinner looked good, and I would have called it quite elaborate on any other day. But, except for some Rosh Hashanah apples and honey hours later, I'm eternally grateful they didn't make me eat anything.