Sarson da saag and makki di roti
Mustard greens slow-cooked with butter and eaten with flatbread of maize: the taste of a Punjabi winter.
In winter the mustard fields of Punjab are green before they turn yellow, and the young leaves are cut and cooked for hours with spinach and other greens, ginger, garlic and green chillies, then mashed with a wooden masher and finished with a lump of white butter or ghee.
It is eaten with makki di roti, flatbread made of maize flour, patted by hand and cooked on an iron tawa, with more butter, raw onion, and a glass of lassi or a piece of gur, jaggery. It is the food of Lohri and of every village kitchen from November to February.
For Punjabis abroad it is the dish of home, and it has become a symbol of Punjabi rural identity.
More the table
The free kitchen where everyone sits on the floor in a line and eats the same food.
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.
The winter season when sugarcane is crushed and its juice boiled in great pans into golden gur.