Lamb, saffron and fennel in a high valley ringed by mountains: meat slow-cooked in yoghurt or red with Kashmiri chilli, greens from the lake, and kahwa against the cold.
Where it comes from
The Kashmir Valley sits high in the Himalaya, and its cooking is shaped by long winters: rice from its paddies, mutton, fish from the Jhelum and the lakes, and summer vegetables dried to see the cold months through. Its spicing is its own — dried ginger, fennel and Kashmiri chilli, which gives colour more than heat — and saffron grows on the plateaus around Pampore.
Two traditions share the valley. Kashmiri Muslim cooking is best known through the wazwan, a feast of many courses of meat cooked by hereditary cooks called waza; it's often traced to cooks who came from Central Asia or Persia, though the story is told many ways. Kashmiri Pandit cooking eats meat too, but traditionally without onion or garlic, leaning on yoghurt, asafoetida, fennel and ginger instead.
South over the Pir Panjal range, Jammu cooks differently again. Its Dogra kitchen is closer to the plains: rajma, sour-sweet pumpkin, and kalari, a cheese fried in its own fat.
Where in it
Srinagar and PamporeThe valley's capital on the Dal Lake, home of the wazwan, with vegetables grown in the lake's floating gardens. Just south-east, the plateaus around Pampore grow Kashmir's saffron.Rogan joshKashmiri yakhniGushtabaTabak maazHaakKahwaModur pulav
Anantnag and the southThe south of the valley, where the Jhelum rises from springs at Verinag, Achabal and Kokernag: rice paddies, orchards, trout streams and a farmhouse table of greens, lotus stem and dried vegetables.
JammuAcross the Pir Panjal, on the edge of the plains: the Dogra kitchen of rajma from the hills, sour-sweet pumpkin ambal, and kalari cheese fried and folded into kulcha.Kalari
How it cooks
Cooking in yoghurt
Whisked yoghurt added to the pot bit by bit and stirred so it doesn't split — the base of yakhni, gushtaba and much else.
Colour, not fire
Kashmiri chilli, and sometimes cockscomb flower or ratan jot root, give rogan josh its deep red without making it very hot.
Pounding
For gushtaba and rista, the waza pounds mutton on a stone with a wooden mallet until it's almost a paste, working in fat as he goes.
Ver
Ground chilli, fennel, dried ginger and other spices bound with mustard oil into a cake, dried, and crumbled into dishes as needed.
Drying for winter
Tomatoes, turnips, gourds, aubergines, greens and fish are sun-dried in summer and soaked back to life in the cold months.