Vaimim Puak, Hearth-Popped Hill Corn

Corn that is too hard to eat is, by a pleasant accident of botany, corn that explodes — and in a region where maize hangs drying from every eave, popped corn is less a recipe than an inevitability. Vaimim puak, "burst maize" in Mizo, appears in the missionary dictionaries of the Lushai-Chin languages compiled a century ago, which is about as close to written food history as this remote corner of the map gets: proof that long before multiplexes, hill families were shaking dried kernels in a covered pot over the hearth fire and eating the results by the fistful through cold-season evenings.

It remains festival food. At Chin National Day gatherings and harvest celebrations, popped corn fills flat baskets alongside boiled corn and sticky-rice cakes, passed around while the millet beer does its rounds. The hill version pops from small flinty field kernels — denser and nuttier than cinema corn — and is seasoned with nothing, with salt, or with salt pounded together with charred chili, which is the version this recipe backs.

The technique is the universal one, done attentively: three scout kernels to read the oil's temperature, a calm shake to keep the unpopped corn moving, and off the heat while the last pops are still coming. The Chin details are in the seasoning — chili salt ground fine enough to cling, applied while the corn still steams — and in the setting, which should ideally involve a fire, a cold evening, and more people than chairs.