Journal Entry 2

FORGOTTEN TREES

THE EXCITING LIFE AND UNNOTICED DEATH OF INDIGENOUS FOODS

©2018  Kajsa Alger

Tamang Translation and Cultural Guide: Bhimsen Tamang

Journal 2, Tekampur

            Can a tree be sexy?  When the bark shaves off to reveal a golden peach colored flesh that is soft and pliable, I may argue that it’s possible.  When that piece of tree is then carried into a village and chopped finely, placed in a bowl of fresh ground flour and made into a dough where speckles of the color fleck and shimmer on the surface, I would say most likely.  That dough is then made into the perfectly round fried pastry called Sel Roti, a staple of the indigenous Tamang and Nepali diet.  You may wrap it up and eat it alone, or dip into some daal or curry.  The tree gives an element of lightness that make the Sel Roti soft and supple.  You dip the Roti into the curry and take a bite.  Your senses explode with the earthy, exotic spices of an age-old comfort food and you realize that yes, a tree can be sexy.

            It is rough country in Tekampur.  The days of farming or herding are long and physical.  The weather is harsh and there is no hot water in Nepal except for hotels.  The traditional Tamang day starts off with a breakfast of Makai Rhoba.  This is a corn kernel, roasted and popped in a mud pot[1] .  Soybeans are also toasted in the pot and combined with the corn kernels and eaten together with achar and either tea or Chyang.  Chyang is a fermented drink made by the indigenous peoples of Nepal.  You can find it made with corn where there are Tamang, Gurung, and Magar tribes. Some Sherpa, Sunuwar and Rai drink as well, but it is less common to make with corn than rice or barley[2].  A cooked grain is mixed with a dried yeast and wild herb flora called Chanzi[3] and then kept in jars or bamboo barrels wrapped with towels for 6 days.  Afterwards, the jars are filled with water and the strained liquid is the Chyang.  The solid product leftover is used for animal feed. 

And so, the day begins.  For the traditional Tamang, some Makai Rhoba with achar and a bowl of Chyang.  Sel Roti and Tea are taken to the fields or for the work day.  The new generation of younger people in Tekampur, as in the rest of the world, opt for quicker and easier foods in lieu of Makai.  Gurulachhin Tamang is 5 years old.  He eats biscuits and tea for breakfast.  It is faster and tastes better[4].  Sel roti is made less and less in the village because of the time it takes, and someone has introduced baking powder into the markets.  Sel made with Damsing is very rare now. 

   

  

   

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[1] A Mud Pot is a pot that has been coated with mud on the bottom and outside so that after cooking over open fire and flame, it can be washed easily.

[2] Chyang is often made with rice, barley, or millet.  The method is the same but corn is also used by the Tamang.

[3] I have heard both the words Marcha and Murcha used for this as well.  The Tibetans call it Pab.

[4] The original Tamang translation of this was “tasty and quick”.  The biscuits are British biscuits, as in cookies.

Journal Entry 1

FORGOTTEN TREES

THE EXCITING LIFE AND UNNOTICED DEATH OF INDIGENOUS FOODS

©2018  Kajsa Alger

Tamang Translation and Cultural Guide: Bhimsen Tamang

Journal 1, Damsing

Close your eyes and picture a small village in Nepal.  What do you see?  Probably, like most of us, you are imagining some version of what looks like a National Geographic spread.  Prayer flags flapping in the wind, the sweeping Himalayas as a landscape, maybe with a Buddhist Temple in the far-off distance.  Pots of chai tea and dumpling street stands dot your city and the people, a “Sherpa” like takeaway from photos of Kathmandu and an Everest film you saw once.  What’s interesting is that you’re not too far off.  There is magic in this place and nature has blessed it too much.  Butting up against the backdrop of this beauty though, is the shift of hard lives trying to make an easier go of things, and the exodus and modernization of some of the oldest indigenous tribes.

Let’s take a trip there, in our minds.  Picture a map of Nepal.  You don’t actually have to know what this looks like, you can simply picture a circle over a place.  The circle gets smaller and smaller until it is just the pinprick of the place we’re going.  You see the circle?  That’s Nepal.

There are 14 zones in Nepal.  The big city of Kathmandu is in the Bakmati zone.  There are 8 districts in Bakmati, the smaller district of Kavre being one of them.  Getting even more localized, within the districts, there are divisions.  One of the divisions of Kavre is Mechchhe (pronounced Met-Chey).  Mechchhe is the 6^th division, so it is called Mechchhe 6.[1]  Within Mechchhe 6 there are 9 villages.  One of those villages, Tekanpur, is where we’re going.  This small village is made up of 115 homes, with many doubling as storefronts.  They had no water (that was not carried in by hand) until 1997, and at that point they still had no motorway in or out of town.  It’s a 2 day walk to the big city of Kathmandu.  In 2018, they now have pipes that bring water to them and a roadway that makes the trip to the city a much shorter and easier 3-hour journey.  These are only a few of the small ways they move towards modernization.  We’ll find my friend, Bhimsen Tamang, here ….and the Tamang people of Tekanpur.

The Tamang people are the largest indigenous group in Nepal and claim the Kathmandu Valley, Yambu, as their land and home.  There are over 50 indigenous peoples in Nepal: Tamang, Gurung, Magar, Sherpa, Limbu… the list goes on, but most likely when people speak of “Sherpas” in Nepal, they are actually referring to Tamang, or possibly one of the other many indigenous peoples.

With the Tamang people comes a culture and history, rich with indigenous foods.  These ingredients lead a life of mysterious seclusion right out in the open.  Although the dishes they help create may be sighted in the food paparazzi of a Facebook page, a shift is happening that will push these invisible ingredients to the brink of extinction.  We’re on our way to find one of these ingredients, because I heard that outside Tekampur, there is a tree.  A single tree, called by locals “the Damsing tree”, that is visited by the Tamang and used as a leavening ingredient in their doughs and batters.  It is not used outside of this village and the numbers of elders are growing fewer as the younger generations move away to seek prosperity.

The Tamang, traditionally, are a farming community.   They eat simple meals, perfected over the centuries.  Dheedo is one of the staple foods of the Tamang diet, made from ground corn flour.  A copper pot with water is put on the fire to boil.[2]  Then, very slowly, the cornmeal is added a little at a time.  There is a special wooden paddle used only for Dheedo (pronounced “dedo”).  The technique is a skilled one.  If you stir too fast, the Dheedo will be gummy.  Too slow and it will be too firm.  The cornmeal is added until it is thick and an almost dough-like consistency.  It is served in a small bowl and is eaten with the fingers in a type of swirl and pinch motion.  I learned with a chuckling audience that you can’t just pinch and eat the Dheedo, as we would a torn piece of bread dipped in olive oil.  Dheedo is eaten by pinching and swirling with your thumb tucked under.  You can dip it into something like gundrook, curry, or milk before bringing to your mouth.  Then, as you draw it to your mouth, your thumb moves forward and pushes, bulldozer-style, the food into your mouth.  This technique, as opposed to sticking your fingers in your mouth and eating the food off of your fingers, is a finesse that I haven’t mastered yet. 

The Tibetan version, called Tsamba, is made from toasted barley flour and often is eaten with butter tea, a strong tea mixed with churned yak butter and salt.  Although Dheedo and Tsamba aren’t in any danger of disappearing from the Himalayan diet, they are a good example of how easily tradition and the food of indigenous peoples is lost, much in the way dialects are lost to the language of the masses.  The way in which the butter tea is made has already started to shift.  Traditionally made in a small, narrow churn that can be carried with a strap to fit the nomadic lifestyle.  It is now often made in a blender, and sometimes cow’s milk butter is used because of the ease and availability.  It’s easy to see how, in an effort to make the tasks of a difficult life more bearable, within a few generations you can lose the nuances of a meal that have been a part of the culture since the Mongolian Stone Age.  When will the Dheedo paddle be replaced by a common house spoon?  It can be argued that if we can forget the essence of Tsamba, then very easily can we forget a lone tree in a small village in Nepal.  This shift is one I’m curious about.  You see, the death of the Damsing tree won’t come about because of anything as dramatic as deforestation or famine or war, but rather from the unassuming little devil of a western product called “baking powder”.

    

 

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[1] At the time this story was started, Mechchhe was in the 6th division.  It has since been changed to the 8^th.

[2] At times, a fermented drink called Brama is added to the Dheedo, which will give it a grayish color.  Similar to the Tongba millet drink of the Limbu people, Brama is specifically Tamang. The photos of Dheedo shown in these journals are made with Brama.