Perhaps I can make some chakuli, I deliberate - a soft dosa like crepe - and stir up a pot of ghugni, white peas gravy. I yearn for some hot badi tarkari, a stew with mild seasoning, dumped on a bed of steamed rice with a side of ambula raee, dried mango spiced with freshly ground mustard.
A flurry of snow settles silently on the windowsill. There are packs of dried white peas and biri (urad dal), and a 1-kg sack of scented rice as well, adequate to make a variety of dishes that can pass the litmus test of out-and-out Odia food.
I’m tempted to eat an ambula, dried mango kernel, when I notice a paper pouch holding pancha phutana that my Kumaoni mother-in-law had handpicked. I find it, relieved that the badis - dried lentil dumplings - are intact. On a frosty January morning in Toronto’s West End, amidst suitcases in my house, my husband and I search our unpacked luggage for the carton my mother handed me in Bhubaneswar. Lopamudra Mishra looks at mainstream Odia food, and how it has been influenced by the region’s first people, the tribals. Odisha’s unique techniques of storing and preserving food come with a class of ingredients entirely their own.
