Tsampa

Tsampa is roasted barley flour, and along Nepal's northern border — Khumbu, Manang, Mustang, Dolpo, upper Humla — it does the work that rice does in the lowlands. Barley is one of very few grains that ripens above 3,000 metres. It is dry-roasted whole and then ground fine, and the roasting is the point: the flour is already cooked, so it needs neither fuel nor a fire to eat, which above the treeline is not a small consideration.

The classic form is pa. A scoop of tsampa goes into a wooden bowl, butter tea is poured over it, and the whole thing is worked with the fingers of one hand while the bowl turns, until it comes together as a stiff dough you tear off in pieces. Done properly it takes seconds and leaves the bowl clean. Thinned with more tea it becomes a gruel drunk before walking; mixed with sugar and yak butter it becomes a sweet; pressed into a ball it becomes the food you carry. It is ritual food too — thrown into the air at Losar, used in funeral rites, and shaped into offering cones.

The taste is nutty and faintly bitter, considerably better than "roasted flour" suggests, though eating it without making a mess of the bowl takes practice. Most trekkers meet it as a breakfast porridge in a Khumbu lodge, or as the flour thickening a Sherpa stew, rather than as pa eaten by hand.

It belongs to the same family of hand-eaten flour staples as dhido in the middle hills, and plays the part in the high valleys that chiura plays in the lowlands: the calories you carry when there is nothing to cook with.