Darjeeling, Kalimpong, Sikkim, Bhutan
Chhurpi, also written churpi, is the cheese of these hills, and it comes in two kinds, which confuses every visitor. At Kalimpong's Haat Bazaar on a Wednesday or Saturday, villages bring it in with leaf-wrapped butter and dalle chillies.
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Soft chhurpi
Soft chhurpi is white and mild, sometimes a little sour. It is cooked with greens, stuffed into momos or ground with tomato and chilli into a chutney. A slab broken off to taste at the Haat is cool and faintly sour.
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Hard chhurpi
Hard chhurpi is soft chhurpi pressed dry in a jute bag, cut into cubes and hung over the fire. You do not chew it: you park it in your cheek and work at it for half an hour or most of an afternoon. Every child here has walked to school with one.
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Kalimpong
Father Andre Butty, one of the Swiss canons of St Maurice who ran the Catholic mission, founded the Swiss Welfare Dairy in the 1950s. Kalimpong cheese is unpasteurised cow's milk, white and a little crumbly when young, with a smooth rind and a mild tang.
Photo: Laker
Kalimpong
The same dairy gave the town its milk lollipops: milk and sugar boiled down in a wide wok and rolled by hand like a cigar. It closed in the 1990s and former workers kept both going. Lark's Provisions on 10th Mile Road sells them when there are any.
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How the town eats it
When a fresh wheel is in town, Kalimpong melts it on toast for breakfast or serves it with guava cheese at tea. For strict vegetarians we ask each maker how the batch was set, since some use animal rennet.
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Bhutan
In Bhutan, datshi is cheese made at home from cow or yak milk and melted with chillies into ema datshi. At Thimphu's market by the river hang strings of chugo, the dried yak cheese, rock-hard and chewed like toffee.
Photo: Rama Krushna Behera
Taking it home
Hard chhurpi goes in any suitcase; fresh Kalimpong cheese, when there is a wheel, rides to the airport in a cool bag. If a market morning matters, we place your Kalimpong day on a Wednesday or a Saturday.
Photo: Arghyadeep Manna / Unsplash