The tandoor and the sanjha chulha
The clay oven sunk in the ground, and the shared village oven where women baked their rotis together.
The tandoor is a big clay oven, sunk in the earth or built of mud, fired with wood or dung cakes. Rotis are slapped onto its hot inside wall and peeled off with a hook when they puff up.
In many villages there was a sanjha chulha, a shared oven, where women brought their dough in the evening, baked their rotis together and passed on the village news. Out of the tandoors of Peshawar and the western Punjab came tandoori chicken, naan and kulcha.
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.
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.