If you have ever wandered through a weekly haat bazaar in Manipur, strolled past the bamboo-fenced homesteads of Arunachal Pradesh, or sat with an elder in a Nagaland village, chances are you have encountered a small, sticky, intensely flavoured morsel being passed around like a quiet ritual. That morsel is Titaura.

People outside the Eastern Himalayan belt often struggle to fit Titaura into a single category. It is not quite a candy. Not quite a pickle. Not quite a chutney. It lives in the delicious no-man's-land between all three — and that is precisely what makes it so compelling.

"Titaura is not something you eat; it is something you remember. One bite and your whole childhood rushes back — the afternoon sun, your grandmother's tin box, the sharp gasp of sourness."

— A Manipuri food writer, describing her earliest memory of titaura