Category: Food and festivals

Why a visit home, or to anyone’s home, always starts with something in your hands.

Flattened rice from Bhagalpur’s fragrant Katarni paddy, eaten with curd and jaggery on Makar Sankranti.

How the seeds of a water plant in Mithila’s ponds become the light, crunchy makhana in your bowl.

Raw jackfruit, cooked and pickled in mustard oil: a pickle people taste once and keep asking about.

Roasted gram flour that Bihar drinks in summer, stuffs into litti and carries on every long journey.

Roasted rice flour, jaggery and ghee, rolled by hand: the simple laddoo that sits beside thekua at Chhath.

Raw mangoes, mustard oil and weeks of sun: how a year’s worth of mango pickle is made.

A flaky, many-layered sweet from Silao, near Nalanda, that shatters at the first bite.

A festive rice sweet coated in sesame that takes days of patience before it ever reaches the pan.

Sesame, jaggery and a lot of pounding: the crumbly winter sweet that Gaya is known for.