Ver: the masala Kashmir remembers

Ask a Kashmiri living away from the valley what they miss, and a surprising number will say ver.

It is not a dish. It is a spice cake — a dense disc or ring of ground chilli, garlic and spices, bound and dried hard in the summer sun, then broken into cooking through the year.

Why it exists

Before the road stayed open, a Kashmiri winter was months long and a good deal of it was spent eating what had been put away in summer.

Vegetables were sun-dried and hung. Meat was dried. And the spices — which lose their aroma in a damp store — were dealt with in the most practical way anyone found: ground while fresh, bound into a paste, shaped, and dried until they were nearly stone.

A ver cake keeps for a very long time. It is concentrated, so a piece the size of a coin flavours a whole pot. And it arrives already blended, which meant a winter kitchen did not have to grind anything at all.

How it is made

In the yards and on the rooftops of the old city, in the hottest weeks of the year.

The chillies are ground, the garlic and shallots pounded in, then the rest — cumin, coriander, black pepper, cardamom, cloves, and whatever the family adds and does not tell you about. Some houses add a little mustard oil, some do not.

The mixture is kneaded to a stiff paste, shaped by hand into rings or thick discs — often with a hole through the middle, so they can be threaded on a string — and put out on a mat in full sun. It takes days. They are turned. Somebody chases the crows off.

When they are done they are hard enough to knock against a table.

The smell

Anyone who grew up in Srinagar knows it. Ver drying is a particular, powerful smell — garlic and chilli in the heat — and it belongs to a specific fortnight of the year. It is one of those smells that is a calendar.

How it is used

Broken, crushed between the fingers, and dropped into the pot early, with the oil.

It goes into fish, into haakh and other greens, into vegetable dishes that would otherwise be plain, and into meat when there is not time to build a masala from the beginning. In many houses a piece of ver is the masala.

Start with less than you think. It is concentrated and it is garlicky, and a whole cake in a small pot will run over everything else in it.

Ours

We make ver in the traditional way, in summer, and grind it for people who would rather measure a spoon than break a cake. The composition is the one the family has always used.

What we will not do is make it all year in a drier and call it the same thing. The sun is doing something to it over those days that a heated cabinet does not, and if we ever cannot make it properly we would rather be out of stock and say so.

That does mean ver is seasonal here. We think that is the honest way round.