Lessons in Slow Eating from a Naga Kitchen

In Zubza, Nagaland, Jenny Pinto rediscovers the joy of immersive cooking, through a week of lavish eating in her hosts’ kitchen.

Nothing prepares you for the first trip to Nagaland. People who have travelled there return with stories of the tribes, the food, the Hornbill Festival, the bad roads. Everything you hear is true, and then some. Life is full of the unexpected.

The purpose of our trip, a group of five, was not to see Nagaland, but to get away from the regular bustle of life to discuss a book project. Zubza, a village twenty kilometres short of Kohima seemed remote enough to get the job done. Off the muddy, unfinished Dimapur-Kohima highway, in a forest at the foothills of the Sovino Tsiekha range, was Niketu and Christine Iralu’s beautiful home, Kerunyu Ki, or the House of Listening. Designed by Ningusalie Talie, Nagaland’s most well known architect, and built by the local community, the house truly had a soul. It was built in 2010 when Niketu and Christine returned to Nagaland, working with Initiatives of Change (formerly the Moral Re-Armament, a movement with roots in the UK, 1938), ‘a diverse, global, multi-cultural network committed to building trust across the world's divides.’ The Iralus are still actively involved with IofC and their home welcomes hundreds of people every year, working towards peace and social change.  

We called Christine on our way from the airport. “Don’t enter through the kitchen, like everyone tends to,” she said, directing us to the front entrance. But really, when you entered her large square kitchen you understood at once that it was the heart of her home. An open fireplace, a 12-seater dining table made from a single tree trunk, and large wooden windows overlooking the kitchen garden. The garden was home to all sorts of greens, including the spicy raja mirchi (which now has GI status) growing in recycled rice sacks filled with compost. Gnarled old tree trunks, picked up off the forest floor had been turned into chairs, benches and sculptures that lent distinctive character to the spacious garden. The forest beyond dipped into a valley filled with low clouds, promising a rainy week ahead.

Christine and her assistant Mylam, of the Konyak tribe, ran the kitchen with unhurried ease. They were used to cooking for the large groups of people who came in and out of the house, entering, as always, through the kitchen. Over the next few days, the kitchen was where we ate countless delicious meals, met several incredible people and had long, engaging conversations.

The Nagas eat a lot of different meats, including that of pig, buffalo, goat, dog, snake, frog, and deer; they eat a large variety of greens as well. Meals are wholesome and flavourful, but the ingredients are cooked simply; meats are smoked or boiled, using very little oil. The emphasis is on the freshness of greens, and the flavours of smoked and fermented ingredients, spiced by the famous raja chilli. Traditional kitchens have a fireplace, and meat is hung from the ceiling, dried and smoked over weeks as a method of preservation. Meat is considered a precious resource, used sparingly to flavour the dish. The community generously brings meat up to Kerunyu Ki whenever an animal is slaughtered. Christine smokes the meat, then freezes it. She places an iron rack high above the fireplace, close to the ceiling, and the meat is slowly smoked over the embers of a wood fire.

The highlight of our first meal was a smoked beef stew, flavoured with zati, or axone, a homemade fermented soy that tastes almost like miso, but earthier. Into the stew pot also went pumpkin, potato, green beans, ginger-garlic and freshly plucked Naga coriander (a long-leaf variety that is more intensely flavoured than the small curly-leafed variety we see more commonly in Indian markets). Eaten with brown unpolished Naga rice, the stew was warming and delicious.

Zubza, a smoked beef stew

Galho is a soupy mix of rice and smoked meat

Dinner was a simple Angami tribe favourite, Galho, paired with an unforgettable smoked tomato and raja mirchi chutney. Traditionally, Galho is a soupy mix of rice and smoked meat with leafy vegetables. Niketu’s Galho that evening included masoor dal and three varieties of garden-fresh Naga greens, including the livino, a creeper that tasted like paan, and a dash of zati. Two days later, after a long trek through the beautiful Sovino Tsiekha hills, past terraced paddy fields in beautiful village of Khonoma, we ate another Galho, cooked at a restaurant run by his cousin. Khonoma, home to Niketu’s ancestral village of the Angami tribe, is of historic significance; it was at the heart of the armed resistance to foreign occupation of Nagaland. Nagaland has 16 tribes, each with its own distinct culture, food and language. Niketu in fact, is the nephew of legendary Naga nationalist leader Angami Zapu Phizo.  

That evening we were joined by Niketu’s old friend and fellow Angami clansman, Visier Sanyu Meyasetsu. After supper, he invoked the tribe’s ancestors with an Angami chant. Closing his eyes, his deep soulful voice flowed around the kitchen and into our hearts. It was beautiful.

The following evening, I offered to cook dinner: spaghetti Bolognese with smoked beef and fresh Naga produce. While I shredded the smoked beef, Maylam went into the garden to pluck tomatoes, a spring-garlic called kovier, (which to me was a cross between onion and garlic), raja chili, basil, rosemary and chives. The result was delicious, or so everyone said, between mouthfuls.

Cooking with bamboo and dekhia

Even the simplest meals are elevated by the smokey raja mirch chutney

But undoubtedly, the highlight of our trip was the visit to Kohima market. We had bravely decided to cook frog, accompanied by whatever caught our fancy at the market. So we purchased bags of live frogs, but none of the silk worm larvae, or the snails or the grubs. We picked up Naga pepper (very similar to its Sichuan cousin), fresh bamboo shoot, fresh oyster mushrooms, wild fiddlehead ferns, dehydrated hibiscus, fresh river fish, dried Naga apples and mango.

For dinner that night, Jenny Liang cooked river fish with the fresh bamboo shoot and fiddlehead fern (a recipe of the Lothia tribe), and Lawrence cooked the frogs with a ghee roast masala that we had brought with us from Bangalore. And I cooked a dish of squash grilled with pumpkin flowers and seeds, sautéed livino, and Naga sticky rice.

Sugar has never been readily available in Nagaland, so desserts aren’t a big part of their repertoire. But the region’s luscious fruit more than compensates for this. Fresh pineapple was in season, juicy and bright, sold in makeshift bamboo shacks along the highway. How does one describe the sheer delight of sinking your face into pineapple wedges on a stick? Another happy discovery was dehydrated wild Naga apple. Fresh off the trees in summer, they are sour, and a lovely tarty-sweet when dehydrated for the rest of the year.

Christine's kitchen in the House of Listening has welcomed many, many travellers over the years, each on their own journeys of bringing change to a troubled world. That they, like us, left with hearts and stomachs full of Naga warmth and generosity is a story worth telling over and over again.

I left Nagaland, carrying with me 4 recipes that allow me to travel back to the House of Listening whenever I cook them in my own kitchen.

RECIPE: Zubza smoked beef stew 

Ingredients
2 tsp zati  or axone (fermented soya)
2 tomatoes, cut into wedges
4 green chilis, slit
6 garlic pods, crushed to a paste
2 inches ginger crushed to a paste
200 g pumpkin, diced
10-12 green beans
2 potatoes, diced
500 g smoked beef, cut into strips
Few sprigs of Naga dhania
A handful of kidney beans
1 tsp Kashmir chilli powder
½ tsp local red chilli powder

Method
Add a little oil in a heavy-bottomed pan
When hot, add in the ginger, garlic and green chilli for a quick stir-fry
Add 4 cups water. When it boils, add the remaining ingredients (water should cover the ingredients), salt to taste.
Bring it to a boil again, then simmer for about 30 mins on a slow flame, until it’s all cooked and the pumpkin is soft.

RECIPE: Galho or Naga Khichdi
Traditionally this dish uses only Naga rice but Christine sometimes adds masoor dal. it can also be a vegetarian dish with whatever vegetable is available, and without the smoked meat.

Ingredients
250 g rice
150 g smoked pork/beef (cut or finely sliced)
1 tbsp axone/ zati  (fermented soya beans)
3- 4 different leaves like spinach, mustard greens, livino, tinga patha
1 cup of  vegetables of your choice (optional)
¼ cup Naga dhania, chopped
1 medium sized tomato, chopped
2 green chillies
Salt, to taste
Water

Method
Soak the rice in water, for an hour or more.
In a pressure cooker, add the axone/zati, tomato, green chilies, salt, and a little water, and cook the mixture for a few minutes.
Add the sliced smoked pork/beef in the mixture and cook the mixture for another 10 minutes.
Drain the water from the  rice, and add it into the axone- and smoked meat mixture.
Stir the whole mixture well and add water into it. The water level should be above the rice mixture level.
Add the vegetable leaves into the mixture and stir again. Add salt if needed.
Seal the cooker and cook with the weight, for 1-2 whistles or till very soft. Serve hot.

RECIPE: Dhekia (fiddlehead fern) with fish and bamboo shoot
There are many ways to cook this, and it can also be cooked with many different fish.

Ingredients
1 bunch of dekhia or fiddlehead fern (This grows wild on the hillside, and is never cultivated)
2-3 fresh tender bamboo shoots
2 tomatoes, chopped
½ tsp mustard seeds
¼ tsp turmeric
2 fresh green chilli, slit
4 pods garlic
½ kg sliced river fish (any fish works)
2 tbsp mustard oil
A squeeze of lime

Method

In a large pot, bring water to boil and add the bamboo shoots. Then turn down the heat to a simmer and cook the bamboo shoots for about 50-60  mins. Allow to cool, then cut it into 1½ inch juliens. Set aside. (It will keep for upto a month in the fridge or several months in the freezer).

Slice fish, salt, and lightly fry in mustard oil. Set aside.

In the same hot oil, add mustard seeds.  When they pop add in the tomato, salt , garlic, chilli and haldi . Add a little water and cook covered for 3-4 minutes. 

Add the fiddlehead fern and cook for 5 minutes, covered.  Uncover and remove some of the wilted dhekia, add the fish slices and cooked bamboo to the pan and cover it with the dhekia that you just removed. The fish should sort of be sandwiched between the greens.  Cook covered for about 15 mins or till the fish is cooked. Serve hot with a squeeze of lime.

RECIPE: Smoked Naga tomato and Raja Mirchi chutney 

Ingredients
1 tomato
1 raja chili
½ inch ginger
1 tbsp oil
5-6 kovier (or garlic greens)
½ tsp mustard seeds
Salt, to taste 

Method
Smoke the tomato and raja chili over a low flame, until the skin turns black.  Remove the skin of the tomaoto, and chop both fine.
Heat the oil, pop the mustard seeds, and add the chopped ginger, kovier, and cook for a few minutes.
Now add the tomato, raja chilli and salt to taste.  Add a little water if needed and cook covered, till soft to the texture of chutney.  

Jenny Pinto is a film maker and lighting designer and will happily dabble in everything that comes her way but food, travel and writing have remained her whims. You can follow her work here.