When Fields, Forests, and Rivers Fed Us

Notes from Sambalpur on Gunjer, Guler, and Jarda Jhuri

I returned from Sambalpur with three unique tastes lingering on my tongue — the crisp sweetness of Sarsatia, the gentle bitterness of Guler phul, and the silken flesh of Jarda fish simmered in mustard gravy. One was festive, one seasonal, one drawn at dawn from the vast waters of the Hirakud Dam reservoir. Yet beneath their differences ran a single thread: each carried the memory of habitat made edible.

In western Odisha, the forest, the river, the pond, and the paddy field were never distant landscapes. They were generous providers of food.

What I encountered in Sambalpur was less cuisine than recollection — of a time when land and water translated directly into sustenance, especially for those with little cash but much knowledge.

The Sweet That Begins with a Twig

Sarsatia is a unique sweet, made by a few families in Sambalpur, for which there is local demand for Geographical Indication tag.

The sweet’s distinction lies not in rice, sugar and ghee; but in a tree.

Tender twigs of Gunjer (Grewia asiatica) are soaked overnight. By morning, the water thickens into a translucent gel. The twig is squeezed; the mucilage folded into rice flour and sugar. Fingers dip into the runny batter and trace wiry spirals into hot ghee.

What emerges is crisp, faintly aromatic, lightly sweet — a texture achieved without yeast or chemical enhancers, but through patient familiarity with plant behaviour. Long before the vocabulary of food science arrived, sweet-makers in narrow lanes of Jhadua Para were drawing natural binders from a plant. The method was empirical, passed from hand to hand. One family traces its practice back nearly two centuries.

No laboratory identified the compound; the forest supplied it.

Sarsatia is thus more than confection. It is a quiet collaboration between tree and grain, between memory and method.

Cooking a Flower That Isn’t a Flower

The Guler tree, botanically Ficus racemosa, bears fruit directly from trunk and branch. What is locally called “phul” is technically a syconium — a fleshy globe hiding inward-facing blossoms. Harvested young, the buds are parboiled to temper their latex and then sautéed with mustard seeds, garlic, and green chilli.

The flavour does not announce itself. It settles gradually — faintly bitter, faintly nutty, unmistakably rooted.

Such dishes reflect a culinary temperament that does not demand spectacle. It recognises the edible potential of overlooked things — buds, forest greens, tender shoots. Seasonality is not trend but rhythm.

A Protein-laden Conveyor-belt

If the forest yielded plant food, the river offered protein.

In monsoon months, small fish once shimmered in the shallow waters of western Odisha. The much-loved Thuro (Amblypharyngodon mola) could be scooped up in a gamcha. Slender and soft-boned, it made a quick curry or was fried crisp and eaten whole — calcium, iron, and oil in one small body.

There were others — maharel, kutri, tengni, patpania, magur, and jarda - firmer and amazingly delicious. These were not commodities transported in iced trucks; they were intimate presences in ponds and canals. Children caught them in ankle-deep water. Men set bamboo traps at field outlets. Women cleaned and sun-dried them on woven mats.

The knowledge required was modest but precise: when the water would rise, where fish would gather, how to set a trap without exhausting a stream. Skill replaced capital.

When Fields Held Fish

Not long ago, the paddy field itself was alive with movement.

Before intensive chemical inputs became routine, the flooded rice field functioned as an ecosystem. As monsoon waters spread, fish from rivers and canals entered the fields. The shallow expanse, rich with nutrients, became nursery and pantry at once.

Farmers placed conical bamboo traps at drainage points. Overnight, fish accumulated. The catch could be generous enough to preserve — sun-dried under the open sky, smoke-cured above chulhas, stored in earthen jars.

In lean months, pakhal bhat with a sliver of dried fish sufficed. A small accompaniment flavoured an entire pot of rice gruel.

Habitat, quite simply, was food security.

The Ecology of Necessity

For the economically vulnerable, biodiversity is not environmental rhetoric; it is daily arithmetic.

The forest supplied edible greens, mushrooms, fruits. Water bodies yielded fish and snails. The field produced rice, millets — and fish. This integrated web required little cash. It depended instead on attentiveness: the ability to forage, to time migration, to weave bamboo into funnels.

Cultivated and wild were not opposites. They were complementary.

The Silence of Paddy Fields

Today, many paddy fields stand quieter.

Overdose of fertilisers, insecticides, and weedicides has altered the micro-ecology of flooded fields. The small fish that once darted between rice stalks are rarely seen. Bamboo traps lie unused. What was once gathered freely must now be bought, if affordable.

The change arrived gradually, almost unseen. Yet it reshaped diet and memory. The disappearance of small fish is not merely the loss of free protein for the poor; it is an unmistakable signal of ecological degradation.

I recalled monsoon mornings of childhood when farmers returned with ludar - U-shaped bamboo baskets - brimming with fish.

Western Odisha’s culinary habits archive the understated ecological intelligence of rural and forest people. Gunjer twigs are gathered without stripping the tree. Guler buds are taken seasonally. Fish are dried for scarcity. These practices evolved under uncertain rainfall and fluctuating river flow. They were responses to vulnerability, not to fashion.

They preserved habitat not because of global campaigns but because sustenance depended upon it.

A Lingering Thought

It would be easy to romanticise that past; it would be inaccurate to do so. Rural life involved labour and risk. Yet the integration of forest, field, and river created a distributed safety net — modest, resilient.

Whether some of that ecological complexity can return remains uncertain. In parts of Asia, rice–fish systems are being revived. Hopefully, such recalibrations will find ground along the Mahanadi River basin, too.

As I left Sambalpur, the aroma of delectable dishes still clinging faintly to memory, I felt both gratitude and unease. Gratitude for having tasted cuisines rooted in habitat; unease at its narrowing base.

Human ingenuity did not invent these foods. It noticed them. The forest offered mucilage; the fig concealed blossoms; the river released fish into fields. People learned to recognise these gestures and shape them into nourishment.

Some of that conversation between land and kitchen still survives — in a twig soaked overnight, in a bitter bud softened by heat, in fish still nourished by our depleting water-bodies.

And sometimes, in remembering the taste, we remember the relationship.

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