Food & Drink in Tibet, 1920s
"Our diet is not the dull routine some of your travellers say it is. It is varied, and as appetizing as yours, and we could vary it much more..."
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From We Tibetans: An Intimate Picture, by a Woman of Tibet, of an Interesting and Distinctive People, by Rin-Chen Lha-Mo, 1926.
Food & Drink
Our staple food is tsamba, flour made from Ney, a kind of barley, which is our chief cereal. All the farms grow it, and tsamba is to us, what wheat flour is to you, and rice to the Chinese of the central and southern belts. We grow wheat also. It is our second cereal. Then maize. Rice, however, does not grow in Tibet, but is imported. Our ordinary cultivated vegetables are chiefly Yung-ma (turnip), La-phu (radish) and Sema (peas). Potatoes have been introduced in some districts and do well, and there are several kinds of vegetables growing wild, such as onion, asparagus, watercress and others, and mushrooms of ten or more varieties. And many kinds of medicinal herbs and roots, such as rhubarb, peimu, chungtsao, "donkey-ear" and so on, much of which is exported to China. We have plenty of fruit; pear, peach, apricot, walnut, pomegranate, apple, strawberry, raspberry, blackberry, gooseberry and so on.
We eat a good deal of meat, beef and mutton and pork. And milk and its products, butter, cheese, cream, form a very important part of our diet.
With all these things as a basis there is plenty of scope for cooking. Our diet is not the dull routine some of your travellers say it is. It is varied, and as appetizing as yours, and we could vary it much more, but we do not eat many of the things, for instance, fish and game, that add to the variety of your diet. It is not that we have not these things. We have them in plenty but it is against our religion to kill and eat them.
Our chief drink is tea, imported as brick-tea from China. Tea does not grow in Tibet. We take butter or milk in our tea. We consider it best with butter, as some of you prefer yours with clotted cream. We flavour it with salt in the place of your sugar. We put the tea-leaves into the kettle, or rather cauldron, add a pinch of soda to bring out the colour, bring the water to the boil, pour off into a churn wherein we add the butter and the salt, and churn it all up until it is properly mixed. Then it is ready for the tea-pot. You may make it as strong or as weak as you like, thin like your tea or thick like your cocoa.
All our tea is thus boiled, not made like yours by pouring boiling water on to the leaves. Tea as we prepare it could not be made from your tea-leaves, for it would be too bitter. It is made from brick-tea upon which boiling does not produce this effect.
We have our own wine, Chung, and our own whisky, Ara, both of which are made from Ney.
Lha-Mo, Rin-Chen. We Tibetans: An Intimate Picture, by a Woman of Tibet, of an Interesting and Distinctive People. Seeley Service & Co. 1926.
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