Mum’s Lemon Daal

Lemon lentils — garlic, cumin, red chilli, onion tadka

from the kitchen

Mum’s Lemon Daal is two family recipes in one bowl: lemon-sharpened lentils finished with an onion tadka, from Arun Mirchandani’s grandmother Savitri, whom the family called Dadima, and from his mother, Vasanti. Dadima never wrote a recipe down. Hers lived in her memory, the family documented what it could over the years, and this daal went on the menu with her approval.

Dadima’s kitchen

Dadima was born in 1922 in Hyderabad, Sindh, one of ten children, and learned to cook young from her mother and her older sisters in what Arun calls a simple kitchen. Her husband’s service moved the family from posting to posting, Bombay, Ahmedabad, Baroda and Delhi, and abroad to Sri Lanka and Egypt, and she cooked her way through all of it: Sindhi first, then Punjabi and Marathi, and South Indian after Arun’s parents married in 1969, because his mother is South Indian. Her cooking ran on two base sauces, onion and tomato, made from scratch with ginger, garlic and an array of masalas, with the meat or the vegetables added to them. Vasanti picked up a great many of her recipes, lives close by, and still spot-checks the kitchen.

What happens in the pot is simple enough to describe and hard to get right. Lentils are cooked down soft and sharpened with lemon, then finished with a tadka — cumin, garlic, red chilli and onion bloomed in hot fat and poured over the top at the last second, so the bowl hisses when it lands on the table. The tadka is not a garnish. It is the entire seasoning strategy of a subcontinent, delivered in about fifteen seconds.

Nowhere to hide

Daal is the least glamorous thing on an Indian menu and the surest test of whether a kitchen can cook. There is nowhere to hide in it: four or five ingredients, no rich sauce to cover a mistake, and a texture that goes wrong the moment anybody stops paying attention to the pot.

Lemon does the work that cream does in richer daals: it lifts, and it keeps the lentils from going heavy halfway down the bowl. This is the dish people order alongside something grander from the menu and then finish first. The Lamb Shank Rogan Josh is the usual grander thing, and it arrives with sauce and rice enough to work through.

How to eat it

Eat it with rice rather than bread if you want it the way it is eaten at home — a spoonful over saffron basmati, then a mouthful of whatever else is on the table, then back to the daal again.

Those recipes came out of Sindh with her at Partition, and four generations on the kitchen still makes them the way she envisioned them. The full story of that crossing is in The Munkey Times, and the shorter version is on Our Story. In her last years Arun would bring this daal to her at home, and she thoroughly enjoyed tasting her own food that she had not cooked. She always loved to put out big spreads for guests; the daal is on the shared-sides list of The Seated Dinner, the set menu we build for private events.

Dietary & spice

Vegetarian, but not vegan — there is ghee and butter in it. It carries no gluten and no nuts. If you are eating vegan, the allergy menu marks the dishes that are, and the kitchen will steer you.

Mum’s Lemon Daal.