Gur and the sugarcane press
The winter season when sugarcane is crushed and its juice boiled in great pans into golden gur.
In winter, after the cane harvest, farmers crush sugarcane in a press, the velna, once turned by bullocks, now by engines. The juice is boiled in a wide iron pan over a fire fed with the crushed cane, stirred and skimmed until it thickens into gur, jaggery, and is shaped into lumps or poured as shakkar.
Children crowd round for fresh juice and hot gur; gur goes into pinnis, Lohri sweets and the rice cooked in cane juice, rao di kheer.
More the table
The free kitchen where everyone sits on the floor in a line and eats the same food.
Mustard greens slow-cooked with butter and eaten with flatbread of maize: the taste of a Punjabi winter.
The warm sweet of flour, sugar and ghee given to everyone at the end of Sikh worship.
Nihari and paye for breakfast, halwa puri on Sundays, and the food streets of the old city by night.
Stuffed tandoor bread with chole, thick lassi in steel glasses, and fried fish: the dhaba food of Amritsar.
The Punjabi breakfast of stuffed paratha and white butter, and the winter and festival sweets of the halwai's shop.
The clay oven sunk in the ground, and the shared village oven where women baked their rotis together.
A dish born of Partition: refugees from Peshawar reinventing tandoori chicken in Delhi.
Spiced chickpeas with puffed, deep-fried bread: the Sunday breakfast of Amritsar, Lahore and Delhi.
The comfort food of every Punjabi home: red kidney beans with rice, and yoghurt curry with fritters.
The famous sweet of Multan: a dense, brittle toffee of wheat, milk, sugar and ghee, studded with nuts.