Sustaining Culture through Cuisine: Some Thoughts on Rovi Chasie’s Naga Cuisine: Ethnic Flavours

Naga Cuisine: Ethnic Flavours by Rovi Chasie was first published in the year 2003. Twenty years later, it has now been republished recently in a new and expanded form. This was perhaps the first cookbook on Naga cuisine published by an individual author. Significantly, 2003 is the same year in which the first Naga novel in English, Easterine Kire’s A Naga Village Remembered, was published. Both the authors are pioneers in their respective ways, and have set the precedent of women turning to writing and documentation to keep our stories and culture alive.

Rovi Chasie is a well known name in the culinary community of Nagaland. She has been creating innovative recipes with Naga food ingredients for more than two decades now. A graduate from the IHM Pusa, New Delhi, she did her Managament Training with the Ashok group of hotels, ITDC and was a member of the Indian Prime Minister’s catering team. Over the years, she has been involved in various capacity building and training programmes in the food sector. She is the recipient of Highest Achievers Prize 2014 from Tenyimia Women Union for the promotion of Naga cuisine. Besides Naga Cuisine: Ethnic Flavours, she has authored two other books, Dine with Confidence (1997; 2013); and The Quaint Little Village (2016).

Some highlights of Chasie’s culinary journey include showcasing her innovative recipes and serving VVIPS and foreign dignitaries including the former President APJ Abdul Kalam, her Royal Highness, Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn of Thailand, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. More recently in May 2023, her snack items were served to the G-20 Summit participants at the Chief Minister’s banquet hall, and during the 1st NLA session. She has also been a judge of “Naga Chef” for several years now, which brought her into contact with Gary Mehigan of MasterChef Australia fame, who wrote a note of best wishes for the book.

Every cookbook has a different intention. They can be creative and inventive ventures, or nostalgic and memorable collections of favourites, or classics, or chronicles of personal histories and cultural traditions. But they all present some kind of storytelling through the experience of food. In that sense, Naga Cuisine is a collection of the author’s favourite Naga dishes, and not the product of in-depth research, as stated in the introduction to the 1st edition (2003). However, it also includes innovative recipes that came about through experimentations with Naga food ingredients.

These are the results of the author’s concern about retaining the richness of our agro-biodiversity. Recently, millets have regained fresh interest in India as a nutritious and sustainable food of the future due to its resilience. But 20 years ago, things were quite different. Even among our Naga farmers, millets and Job’s tears were neglected crops and pushed to the margins. In her own small way, Rovi Chasie has been making efforts to ensure that we do not lose this species of crops because that would mean losing the traditional knowledge system associated with them.

So began her journey of experimenting with these nutritious food grains to present them in ways that are suitable to the contemporary palate. She started sharing these recipes with village women in various hospitality trainings, hoping that such efforts would encourage production and assist people’s livelihood.

In the Preface to the 2nd edition, she says one of the main reasons that prompted her to republish her book was the declaration of 2023 as the International Year of Millet by the United Nations. This inspired her because millet is one of her favourite food grains and over the past 20 years, she had been keenly promoting and encouraging the cultivation and use of such food grains. 

But what sets this new edition of Naga Cuisine apart is that this is not just a cookbook. It begins with a section of articles on some aspects of food and Naga cuisine. The author sets things in context by drawing attention to important factors of food and culinary art, tracing the journey of Naga cuisine, and its growth and development. By including these thoughts, she attempts to truly understand the role of food, the place it occupies in people’s lives, and how it actually represents their culture.

The recipe section is a composite collection of Naga dishes from different tribes, some traditional and some innovative. The traditional recipes include popular dishes like the Angami Muodi, Ao Rosep, Konyak Nük-Nge, etc. In addition to the meat dishes of beef, pork and chicken, there are recipes using silkworms, woodworms, crabs, spiders, king hornet, grasshoppers, snails and frog. Besides, there are enough vegetable recipes too, using local ingredients like forest fern, squash, yam sprouts, kholar, rice beans, and mushrooms, and an array of Naga chutneys and pickles.

Besides recipes for cooking, the book also contains traditional methods of food preservation such as preparing dried/smoked meat, anishi, and the process of fermenting cucumber, crab, soyabean, bamboo shoot, and mustard leaves.

Among the innovative recipes are the snacks and sweets such as millet cakes, cookies, pancakes, and laddoos; corn pancakes, sticky rice snacks, Job’s tears pudding, Job’s tears patty, ginger candy, wild apple and gooseberry candies, and blackberry jam. Despite the unbeatable and wholesome flavours of our vegetable and meat dishes, Nagas don’t have too many varieties of fast food or snack items. Hence, these innovative recipes enhance the use of local ingredients, and add to a rather deficient component in traditional Naga cuisine, ie., snacks, sweets and desserts.

Though the book is mainly intended for the home cook, the snack items and recipes like dry tiny fish preserve, meat balls with dried bamboo shoot, minced meat with bamboo shoot juice, fried spicy crab, mixed meat with silam, kholar crunch, and golden bowl (a combo of different food grains) could easily be included on the menus of Naga-run restaurants that currently serve mostly Chinese and Continental food. Hopefully, one day our children will also say their favourite food is kholar crunch, or Job’s tears pudding, or millet cookies.

As Seno Vihienuo accurately states in the Foreword, the recipes are “simple but highly nutritious meals with emphasis on organic ingredients.” With the variety of choices on offer, there’s something for everybody. The ingredients are fairly easy to source, and the recipes are practical and easy enough to make. There’s a wide variety of popular Naga cuisine that is well represented. But it also reflects the changing dynamics of our food culture.

Written for the future generation, the intention behind the author’s work is commendable. The book does not only contain recipes to help you cook Naga food, but more importantly, it documents our culinary heritage and promotes our cultural knowledge. It calls for the importance of retaining certain knowledge systems while at the same time also showing the way to adapt and innovate creatively to keep growing. There is so much scope for those who are willing to take the bite!

Ultimately the story that unfolds is that of sustaining our culture through sharing our food ways. And the way the contents of the book have been sourced together is a testament to the collaborative way in which women work in our society. The culture of sharing is manifested in the various people who helped source the traditional recipes and are duly credited. In the same way, the author shares her own innovative recipes with her readers/community – all in the hope that these efforts will have some kind of impact on retaining our culinary heritage, and help sustain our culture through our cuisine.

Vizovono Elizabeth

vizovonoe@gmail.com