Posted by Robin Bellinger, April 2, 2008 at 3:30 PM
Although I love dried legumes and pulses more than most non-vegetarians, and although I love the vegetables and meat dishes in An Invitation to Indian Cooking, I tend to avoid the chapter on dals. I think this is because the first dal recipe I ever tried was Jaffrey’s moong dal. “This is North India’s most popular dal,” she writes, “and it is eaten with equal relish by toothless toddlers, husky farmers, and effete urban snobs.” That sounds delightful, right? But it calls for a full tablespoon of turmeric, which was definitely not to my taste. I wonder if my American turmeric is not so great or if it’s my American palate. What do you think?
Recently I had much better luck with her chana dal cooked with lamb. . Chana dal is a hulled and split dal whose grains are a little larger than split peas; it is a member of the chick pea family. In this recipe, it is cooked with so much lamb that it seemed more like lamb stew than a dal to me, but I certainly wasn’t complaining.
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