Dahl

Fancying something hot, wet and fairly bland, I have been having a dhal fest for the past couple of days. Something we have eaten quite a bit of in the past, but not of recent years.

BH had the first go and I had the second, the recipe that follows being the one that I used, slightly more complicated than hers.

Finely chop a couple of cloves of garlic and fry them gently in butter. Add some freshly bashed black pepper. Finely chop a couple of onions and add them in. Fry until soft. Add 8oz of red lentils and maybe 500ml of water. Cook for 45 minutes or so, stirring from time to time and adding more water if necessary.

Consume as soup, possibly with the help of some dry, brown bread.

All perfectly satisfactory and far simpler than the recipes which I was able to turn up this afternoon, many of which also come festooned with irritating advertisements. With the snap above being the best I could do, not having thought to snap my own dhal, but not much like this last. Which was quite like the sort of dhal we used to get as a side dish in sub-continental restaurants - but perhaps now they have gone all complicated too.

PS: searching the archive for dhal was confused by alternative spellings, flowers like Dahlias and the writer Roald Dahl. But I am reminded that I read all about Dahl and his works at reference 2 this afternoon, on which account he was every bit as odd a cove as I had remembered. His time at public school and his service as a fighter pilot in the first part of the second war may have been part of this. And I learned that his early writing included pornographic stories for Playboy.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dal. No recipes, complicated or otherwise, but a reasonable starting point.

Reference 2: Making It Big: In Roald Dahl’s stories, cruelty begets cruelty, children grow large, adults grow small, and everyone is trapped in a fun house of dirty, depthless mirrors - Merve Emre, NYRB - 2022.