Residents of Ganish, in northern Pakistan, dig for culinary gold—butter fermented under the village square.
Here, the Homemade Butter Is Aged for Half a Century
The Hunza people of northern Pakistan stash ingots of cow and yak butter underground for decades.
Baqar Taihan is digging for edible treasure.
In Ganish, an old Silk Road stop high in the snowcapped mountains of northern Pakistan, Taihan is overseeing the exhumation of a valuable stash of fatty gold: ingots of cow and yak butter, packed inside casings of birch bark, that have been buried for years beneath paving stones of the village square. Some of the cached butter is older than middle-aged Taihan himself.
“Our grandparents say we used to bury it for up to a century,” Taihan, a local community activist and an amateur historian, says. “Today the oldest butter I know of is only about 40 or 50 years old.”
And then there’s maltash.
“The [butter] here, like all that was given to us in
