Dhido.

Long before rice reached the hill villages of Nepal in any quantity, people there ate what grew on steep, dry, unirrigated terraces: buckwheat, finger millet, barley and later maize. Dhido is what you make from those flours when you have a pot, water and fire and nothing else — no oven, no oil, no grinding stone for dough. It belongs to a family of grain mushes found across mountain agriculture worldwide, from Italian polenta to East African ugali to Tibetan tsampa, and like all of them it is defined by the flour available at that altitude rather than by any recipe.

For most of the twentieth century dhido carried a class stigma inside Nepal. Rice was the aspirational grain, bought from the lowlands, served to guests and eaten at festivals; dhido was what hill families ate the rest of the time because rice was expensive. Families who could afford rice ate it, and dhido quietly became shorthand for a poor village upbringing. That has flipped in the last couple of decades. Nutritionists pointed out what hill families already knew — that millet and buckwheat have far more fibre and minerals than polished white rice and release their energy slowly — and dhido moved onto Kathmandu restaurant menus as a heritage dish, often served in a small brass bowl with gundruk, a meat curry and several achars.

The cooking is genuinely a physical skill. The tool is a dhido-hurpi, a flat wooden paddle, and the technique is to add flour to boiling water in stages while beating and pressing it against the side of the pot so no lumps survive. Done properly the mass pulls away from the pot in one glossy lump and holds a fingerprint. Done impatiently it stays lumpy and tastes of raw flour. Traditionally dhido is not chewed much — pieces are swallowed after a quick dip — which is why the surface texture matters more than the crumb.