The Other Mussoorie
Discover the quiet side of the crowded hill station -cedar
forests, colonial hotels and delicious Garhwali food
It is Ruskin Bond's 82nd birthday, the day we drive up to
Mussoorie. The author, the town's most famous curiosity, be sieged by the
attention of tourists and locals alike, is supposedly going to dine at The
Tavern, the poshest restaurant on Mall Road.
All through the day, he has received cakes and greetings from a
constant stream of admirers, we are told. Those who have gone to his Landour
cottage found themselves doubly fortunate as they sat ensconced in his drawing
room, listening to a story he has chosen to read. The author has been in a good
mood all day. To shake hands with him at The Tavern may well be worth it. But
neither the prospect of sundowners the restaurant is famous for nor an
encounter with India's very own Bond can com pel us to brave the Mall this
summer. For many years now, the Queen of the Hills has been fraying. To walk up
and down Mall Road, biting into the mandatory corn on the cob, no longer seems
like a charming way to pass time. And rubbing shoulders with everyone you know
from Delhi plus their cousins in an overcrowded hill station is frankly as dreadful
as it gets. But there's another Mussoorie, beyond this jostling, touristy,
fading town. A Mussoorie of silent cedar forests, quiet trails, colonial bars
and hotels where you can stay immersed, reading, writing or waiting for Godot,
villages you can drive down to discover pahari grains and greens and, above
all, food that goes beyond hill station clichés.
In the 1970s, when my grandfather who worked in the Railways,
was posted at Jharipani, a hamlet with a famous boarding school run by the
Northern Railways, the thing to do when you got off the train at Doon, was to
look for Barkat ka Dhaba. Located just outside the Dehradun railway station, it
apparently served some of the best Punjabi food.Hot tandoori rotis with dal
were raved about and the freshness of its all-vegetarian fare was legendary.
More than the stories about the food and its unparalleled taste, what
fascinated me was the name of the cook -Barkat, benediction in Urdu. You don't
hear such names today. They seem relics of a fast-disappearing syncretic past
that is no longer accessible to us. A past where Barkat turned out pure Punjabi
veg food and Ellora, the iconic Rajpur Road bakery, turned out perfect plum
cakes for Christmas.
Ellora still exists. But the original Barkat has long disappeared.
What abounds all over Doon and Mussoorie is generic, restaurantised food,
loosely Punjabi or “Continental“, connoting nothing more than cheesy pizzas and
pastas, some good omelettes and the occasional crepes. Plus, noodles and momos
and smatterings of Indian-Chinese comfort food. Where then can you sample one
of those hidden Indian cuisines that deserve a showcase: Garhwali food? What
really is that food? And is it possible to sample it outside private homes?
This Mussoorie trip is dedicated to finding out much of this.
Go Local
About 15 kilometres downhill from Mussoorie, past the Kempty
Falls, is Bhatoli, a relatively prosperous village that grows maize. Dried corn
is strung together and hung outside homes as a symbol of prosperity. The more
the number of cobs, the more prosperous the household is deemed. A house that
stands out is not merely the most prosperous but also architecturally the most
unique. It is a wooden hill house, over 100 years old, carefully preserved by
the family of the sarpanch, the village head, even when neighbours have taken
to building with cheaper concrete.
You walk through the tiny doorways and raised thresholds,
typical of hill houses, to find Kiran cooking on a wood-fired chulha. The
kitchen is right at the back, past the living area and a spartan bedroom. It is
just another room from whose roof one of the black stones lining it has been
removed. This hole that looks out into the sky is the chimney. Kiran is cooking
a simple breakfast: maize rotis with kaddu ka raita, made with thin buttermilk
and the gourd which is in season. The raita is tempered with a local
mustard-like spice. Jhakia, which resembles mustard seeds and is slightly
peppery, is from this region. You rarely find it in the plains. Here, it is all
pervasive, used in tempering everything from dahi to dal.
Garhwali food is just about its ingredients.Whatever grows
locally is cooked simply, usually without much fuss. It is the ingredients that
are fascinating. But outside the local communities, which grow and eat them,
knowledge about the many types of greens and grains that grow in this belt is
abysmal.
“I belong to this region. When I came back here after working in
hotels and restaurants all over the country and abroad, I realised that we have
not been paying attention to our own food,“ says Sunil Kumar, chef and F&B
director at the two-year-old luxe JW Marriott resort. The hotel has been upping
the tourism game in this region, trying to woo a different segment of higher
spending domestic tourists than what Mussoorie usually gets. Luckily, there is
an accent on local experiences instead of generic “international“ ones. The JW
café, under Kumar, is ironically the only restaurant in the hill station where
you can get a taste of Garhwali home cooking -quite comprehensively.
Women from nearby villages come daily and cook mandua (finger
millets) ki roti , bhatt (a variety of soybean) and gahat (horse gram) ki dal,
stuffed paranthas and fried kachoris filled with pahari aloo or the local
rajma, fresh chutneys made on traditional sil battas and stir-fried or soupy
greens, including chowlai (amaranth) and the fascinating bichchu ghas,
literally the stinging scorpion's grass. It is the local name for nettle and is
used as folk medicine as well as food.
Then there is the meat. The bhunni is an acquired taste. Made
from goat's liver, intestines and blood, this is a poor man's curry, using the
“leftovers“ from the animal. For a rich man's curry, or a festive dish, the
animal is stuffed with local herbs, roasted or curried.
Bhang ki Chutney as well as bhangjeera, the seeds of the plant,
which are used as a spice, are part of the traditional Garhwali food. This
time, they seem to have gone missing. Perhaps, the locals are wary of referring
to it. But there is a variety of cloudberry that you normally associate with
the Arctic region: here it is popular in the making of country liquor. The
Finns make a fancy liqueur from the berries, but the local pahari liquor, under
the radar, uses the roots.
The Food People
If local food is just about making an appearance in this part of
Uttarakhand, some Mussoorie folks are making their way home and into the food
business. Café Ivy at Chardu kan offers stunning views from its wooden log
cabin interiors. It opened around Christmas last year and has been an instant
hit.Serving up all American breakfasts, club sandwiches, baked nachos, chicken
wings, pancakes and other American-style eats, it is an enterprise by three
friends, all belonging to Mussoorie.
Mohit Mittal worked with an asset management company in Delhi
before he got tired of the plains and the corporate rut and decided to head to
the hills to build summer homes for Delhi's elite who may want to spend the
summer in Mussoorie. He is still engaged in that but, along the way, he teamed
up with Ashish Sharma, who is in construction business, and Dipankar Tripathi,
a software engineer, to set up Café Ivy, which is doing roaring business. “From
day one, we have been busy. Within a month, we broke even on the operational costs
and even paid back a part of what we had borrowed to set this up,“ says Mittal.
The Little Lama Café, which came up about two years ago and is
quite sought after, is also an enterprise by a new generation of locals.Tenzin
Lama and his wife ran a handicrafts business in Delhi for a couple of years
before coming back and setting this up.
The other new addition has been The Landour Bakery by
Mumbai-based restaurateur Sanjay Narang, who has a home here.
Past is Another
Cuisine
That Mussoorie is changing is undeniable.You don't even have to
bear witness to the regular traffic jams at Library Chowk or the gradual
disappearance of fruit sellers -there are hardly any peddlers of plums,
apricots and berries in small pattals during the high season -to know that.
But there are other establishments that have remained. Vaidehi
Deshpande, a Mumbai girl, who has been adopted by Mussoorie and knows its ins
and outs, swears by the peanut butter at Prakash Store in Sister's Bazaar. The
old store once sold berry jam and locally made cheese to the Nehru family.
Motilal Nehru was apparently a regular. As was Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit who stayed
in Land our. Jawaharlal liked the jam, the story goes, but it is really the
peanut butter that is best known here. “It is worth making a trip to the Mall,“
says Deshpande.
Perhaps it is. But we are content to stay put elsewhere: near
Jharipani, where my grandfather once lived, amid the towering deodars and
pines, and deep silences all around.
The Nabha Palace was the summer residence of the royal family of
Nabha before being taken up by the Delhi-based hotel company The Claridges on a
long-term lease. It is built like a colonial mansion with a mixed
Victorian-Indian architecture: it has a front garden typical of English country
homes and the central courtyard of old Indian havelis. The Victorian Bar here
is quiet, lined with books, an assortment of durbar photographs and dark,
sinkable couches.It's the perfect spot for the evening measure of scotch or
brandy -both to keep the chill at bay and relive an old era. Or, sip on a
Bloody Mary or other classic cocktails that they rustle up on request. To
contemplate on the twinkling lights of Mussoorie from here is the perfect hill
break.
Anoothi Vishal
ET29MAY16
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