Here, find 16 dishes to help you broaden your horizons—and discover the rich variety of North Indian food.
If your experience of eating Indian food begins and ends with butter chicken and chicken tikka masala, we have news for you. First, you’d be amazed to know that butter chicken was an accidental stroke of genius first made in Delhi in the 1950s from leftovers, and that tikka masala isn’t Indian at all—it’s British.
The term ‘North Indian’ is a bit of a misnomer, being too broad to truly sum up such a vast and diverse region; still, what is sold across the globe as Indian cuisine is primarily food that originated from North India. The loosely defined region spans eight states—namely Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Uttarakhand, Delhi, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh—with almost 50 percent of North India’s population being vegetarian.
The food cultures of Delhi and Uttar Pradesh are influenced by Mughlai and Awadhi cuisines, thanks to the rich mix of communities that call the city their home, while Punjab and Haryana rely heavily on dairy and livestock. Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttarakhand have a strong inclination toward staples like wheat and millet, and Ladakh in Jammu & Kashmir has a strong Tibetan influence due to its proximity to the plains of the Himalayas, as well as Persia and central Asia.
But to answer the long-standing question of why butter chicken and naan are so popular around the globe, it’s important to look to the Anglosphere. The Punjabi diaspora was the largest to migrate out of the sub-continent during the partition, and remained one of the most influential provinces of Pakistan after the Indian Independence Act of 1947, with the large influx influencing the Western understanding of Indian food and culture to this day.
Regional dishes from North India, particularly Punjab, may have found immense popularity worldwide, but it would be injudicious to call it the flag bearer of Indian cuisine, with the diversity of cultures across the country making it difficult to categorize everything under one large umbrella. Garhwali cuisine relies heavily on grains and cereals, and the recipes are often relatively simple, using minimal spices.
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