Recipe
Red lentil dal with rice and spinach
Dal is probably the most-eaten dish on the planet, and Italy has no equivalent, which is odd, because the logic behind it is exactly the logic that produced pasta e ceci.
Both are a cheap pulse cooked soft, seasoned hard, and served with a starch. Both were designed by people who needed to eat well without meat and could not afford to be bored by the result. The difference is that India kept the seasoning as a separate operation at the end and Italy folded it into the beginning, and those two decisions produced completely different cuisines out of nearly identical raw material.
The separate operation is called a tarka, and it is the thing worth taking from this page even if you never make the dish again. You cook the lentils plainly, in water, with turmeric and salt, until they collapse. Then, in a small pan, you heat oil and fry whole spices in it for about forty seconds, until the cumin seeds pop and the garlic turns gold and the whole kitchen changes. Then you pour that sizzling oil into the pot and stir it through.
The difference between a dal with a tarka and a dal without one is not marginal. It is the difference between something worthy and something you would choose to cook again.
Red lentils are the fastest pulse there is. No soaking, twenty minutes, and they collapse entirely into a thick purée, which is precisely what you want here and precisely what you do not want in the lentil and potato stew elsewhere in this book.
Spinach stirred in at the end, rice underneath, and somewhere around eighty cents a portion.
- Prep 10 min
- Cook 30 min
- Serves 2
- Cost €
Method
- 1
Put the lentils, water, turmeric, onion and tomatoes into a pot. Bring to the boil and skim off the foam that rises in the first few minutes.
8 min
- 2
Simmer, half-covered, stirring occasionally, until the lentils have collapsed completely and the whole thing is thick and smooth. Add water if it gets too stiff.
22 min
- 3
Salt it properly now, not before. Stir in the spinach and let it wilt into the pot.
3 min
- 4
Cook the rice in plenty of salted water and drain.
12 min
- 5
For the tarka, heat the oil in a small pan until it shimmers. Add the cumin and mustard seeds and wait for them to pop, then the garlic and chilli. Forty seconds, and pull it off the moment the garlic is gold.
2 min
- 6
Pour the whole sizzling contents of the small pan into the lentils and stir once. Finish with lemon juice, and serve over the rice.
1 min
Variations
Yellow split peas or brown lentils instead, with 20 minutes more cooking. A tin of coconut milk in place of 200 ml of the water makes it richer and South Indian. Add cubed sweet potato or cauliflower at step 2. Fresh ginger with the garlic in the tarka. Curry leaves if you can find them, which are worth going out of your way for. Freezes flat and thaws in a sink of warm water.