Rice vs. all comers

21 September / 5 Ashoj

I'm staying at a friend's place in Bhatbhateni, a relatively quiet, Westernized/ritzy neighborhood north and east of the heart of Kathmandu. The worst thing about not living with a local family is not being fed. This may be a blessing in disguise, though, since in this context being fed is reminiscent of Hansel and Gretel. The tradition of hospitality runs strong here, and that mostly boils down to food and lots of it. And for the un-initiated, Nepali food* is quite a strange beast.
By food, I mean rice. The Nepali word for food is 'khaanaa,' and it is literally synonymous with daal-bhaat, the ubiquitous staple of boiled rice and thin lentil/pulse broth. Of course everyone eats other things besides--boiled eggs, fruit, milk, tea, momos (tibetan-style dumplings), chowmein, all kinds of meat (except beef), chowmein, and, increasingly, chips, fries, soda, and pizza. Or chiura, dry flattened rice,but this doesn't really count as rice at all. Everything just listed falls into a different category altogether: it is 'khaajaa,' roughly 'snack food.' One might eat it in the morning, before the mid-morning khaanaa, or in the afternoon with tea, or while walking down the street. But it's not food, really. Just 'time pass,' as the Indian Anglicism goes.
So twice a day, if all is going well, you have your daal-bhaat. It comes on a metal plate with a lip around it to contain the juices, or a TV-dinneresque subdivided plate. Either way, if you're focusing on the meal in front of you the various colorful adornments aren't likely to distract you from the dominant feature: the mountain of rice. For starters--and you will be given more--it's about 4 times as much rice as you'd get with your beef with broccoli at a Chinese place in the states. It's white, and fluffy, and there's a ton of it. There's also a small metal bowl of daal, your soupy lentils, one of dozens of kinds of whole or split legumes, with or without floating bits of vegetables, spiced or plain. This is for lubricating the rice, and for adding some protein. There are one or two vegetable dishes, unless it's special occasion (you're a guest in someone's house, say), in which case one of these is a meat dish, probably goat. Almost every meal of daal-bhaat includes a potato dish, which counts as a vegetable, much to the chagrin of the gringos who may at this point throw their hands up in despair of something green. Luckily for them, it is equally common to find some sort of saag (cooked greens) as the other veg dish. All these vegetables are intensely flavored--with ginger, garlic, cumin, coriander, ajwan, fenugreek, chilies, mustard oil--and plenty of salt. It's no coincidence that there ain't a whole lot of them, just enough in fact to flavor every mouthful of rice. For this same purpose the plate always includes an even more concentrated source of flavor, the achar. If you got a quarter cup of tarkari (veggies), the achar will amount to maybe a teaspoon. It's generally so spicy, salty and/or sour that you wouldn't want much more than that. Popular achars around here are either toasted sesame seed-based or tomato-based, pasty or runny respectively. Finally there may be some raw onion, or daikon radish, or cucumber--western concessions, I suspect, for those who clamor for salad. This is not the country for salad-eaters.
So how do you tackle this smorgasbord? Well, you roll up your sleeves, wash your hands--your right hand, anyway--and dig in. Eating with your fingers is a much more sensual experience than employing a metallic middleman. You 'taste' the food twice, feeling its temperature and consistency before it enters your mouth. There's an art to this kind of eating, of course, and takes a few times before it's comfortable for a bideshi (foreigner). But soon you're mixing away, balling up perfect mouthfuls of wettened rice, a morsel of succulent potato, a twist of bitter mustard greens, a trace of fiery achar. And if you're not careful you'll look up just in time to see another avalanche of bhaat cascading down on top of it all, and a wickedly-smiling woman's face. Don't hesitate. Accept your fate, stretch your stomach, and soon you too will be a rice-eater, someone who can't be satisfied with anything else edible. For the slightest sign of hesitation will prompt protests of 'mitho bhaena? isn't it good?' and you'll have to do overtime to make up for your rudeness.

The daily necessity of eating provides plenty of opportunities for cross-cultural comparison, above and beyond the content of the food. My friend Alden and I have been frequenting a hole-in-the-wall near his place, where a stout and sassy Gurung or Tamang woman serves up daal-bhaat twice a day for fiftee rupees a plate (less than a dollar). Never mind the fact that she's 4 foot 2 and I 6 foot 3 and our weights are roughly equal--we're about equally far our on the no-man's land region of the bell curve. I'm more interested in how she interacts her customers, joking with them, handing them single cigarettes, grubby glasses of homemade liquor. From the first time I met her she took me in stride and called me "Babu." This is not a Kansas family restaurant. If I thought of the place as a restaurant at all, I'd be amused by the juxtapositions of American popstar posters next to Buddhist images on the mildewy walls, and perhaps annoyed when the rice is cold. After all, you have to come at the right time! Where's the menu, anyway? And what's that chicken doing underfoot, pecking up rice from one end and fouling the place up from the other? Come next week, babu, and you'll find him on your plate.


*'Nepali food' is a bit of a fiction, as there are hundreds of ethnolinguistic groups in this country and no two of them shares exactly the same culinary culture. The high-Himalayan peoples eat very little rice, and lots of barley and yak products and potatoes. In the Terai, Nepal's southern plains region that borders India, you're apt to find roti (wheat flatbread) as often as daal-bhaat, and the spicing of the 'curries' (meat or veg dishes) will be more North Indian than what I've described. Newar food, dspite coming from Nepal's heartland, is different again and absolutely unique. But it's true that daal-bhaat spans many of the ethnic or tribal divides, and the differences frmi one plate to another don't outweigh the basic commonalities.