Rajasthani Dal Baati Churma and Ker Sangri: Desert Cooking Without Water

Most great regional cuisines are defined by their abundance: the spice gardens of Kerala, the rivers of Bengal, the dairy of Punjab. Rajasthani cooking is defined by the opposite. It is the food of the Thar Desert and the arid Marwar region, where water was precious, fresh green vegetables were a rarity for much of the year, and a dish had to survive days of heat without spoiling. Out of that scarcity came one of India's most distinctive and resourceful cuisines, and its emblem is a plate of dal, baati and churma.

Cooking Shaped by Scarcity

To appreciate Rajasthani food you have to picture the conditions that created it. In the desert districts, fresh water could not be wasted on cooking, so dishes were designed to use as little as possible, often substituting milk, buttermilk or ghee for water entirely. Fresh vegetables wilted within hours, so the cuisine leaned heavily on what could be dried and stored: lentils, gram flour, and the wild beans and berries of the desert scrub. Ghee, far from being an indulgence, was a practical preservative; food cooked in and sealed with clarified butter keeps far longer in heat. The famous richness of Rajasthani cooking is, in part, a survival strategy.

Baati: Bread Baked in the Embers

The baati is the heart of it. It is a hard, round ball of dough made simply from coarse wheat flour, ghee and a little salt, with no leavening and no need for fermentation. Traditionally it was not boiled or fried but baked slowly in the embers of a dung or wood fire, or buried in hot desert sand, which required no precious water and could be done anywhere a fire could be lit. The result is a dense, nutty, slightly cracked roll with a crisp crust that keeps for days. When it is ready it is split open and drenched in hot ghee, which soaks into the dry crumb. A heraucherd village shepherd could carry baatis for a journey and eat them with nothing more than buttermilk; on the dinner table they are paired with dal.

The Dal and the Churma

The dal that accompanies baati is typically panchmel or panchratna dal, a mix of five lentils, chana, toor, moong, urad and masoor, spiced with a robust tempering of cumin, cloves, dried red chilli, asafoetida and plenty of ghee. The baatis are crushed into the dal at the table so they soak up the spiced lentils. Then comes churma, and this is the genius of the dish: churma is made from the very same baati dough, baked and then coarsely crushed, before being sweetened with jaggery or sugar and bound with yet more ghee, sometimes with cardamom and chopped nuts. One dough, baked once, becomes both the savoury staple and the sweet, all from store-cupboard ingredients that needed no refrigeration. Eaten together, the sweet churma, the rich dal and the ghee-soaked baati form a complete, sustaining meal perfectly suited to hard physical work in a punishing climate.

Ker Sangri: The Desert's Own Vegetable

If dal baati churma is the staple, ker sangri is the dish that most fully expresses the desert larder. It is made from two wild desert ingredients almost unknown outside Rajasthan:

• Ker, the small, sour berry of a thorny desert shrub
• Sangri, the long, slender bean pods of the khejri tree, the hardy tree often called the lifeline of the Thar

Both are harvested and then sun-dried for storage, which is precisely the point: this is a vegetable dish you can make months after anything green has vanished from the landscape. To cook it, the dried ker and sangri are soaked, often in buttermilk to soften them and take the edge off their natural bitterness, then cooked with dried red chillies, plenty of spice, and traditionally a good amount of oil or ghee, sometimes with raisins or dried mango (amchur and kokum) added for a sweet-sour lift. The finished dish is tangy, chewy, intensely flavoured and remarkably long-keeping, designed to travel and to last. It is the taste of the desert made edible.

Ghee, Preservation and the Royal Table

Two further strands run through Rajasthani cooking. The first is preservation: alongside dried vegetables, the region produced sun-dried papads, wadis (spiced lentil dumplings), and an array of fierce, oil-sealed pickles, all ways of banking food against lean months. The second is the royal kitchen. The Rajput warrior clans and their princely courts developed a parallel tradition of game and rich meat cookery, the fiery laal maas coloured with Mathania chillies being the most famous, cooked in ghee and kept robust enough to travel on hunts and campaigns. Vegetarian survival food and lavish royal feasting grew side by side.

Eating It in Britain

Rajasthani cooking is not as widely represented on the British high street as Punjabi or Bangladeshi food, but it is increasingly worth seeking out, especially at regional thali specialists and at the larger Indian community festivals and pop-ups. If you spot dal baati churma on a menu, order it: it is messy, generous, ghee-rich eating, best enjoyed with your hands by crushing everything together. Ker sangri is rarer still, since the ingredients have to be imported dried, but where it appears it is the genuine article, a direct taste of how an entire people learned to eat well in a place with almost no water at all. Few cuisines tell their own history so clearly on the plate.