An Invitation to Indian Cooking - Madhur Jaffrey [89]
To serve: Arrange the pullao on a large platter. Crumble the browned onions and sprinkle all over rice. Serve with plain yogurt or Yogurt with Potatoes. Also serve a vegetable—perhaps a cauliflower dish—and a salad (tomato, onion, and cucumber salad).
Remember that this rice dish will stay hot for 20 to 25 minutes after it is cooked if you leave it covered on the stove. Also, after the rice is cooked, it is best to give the steam 5 to 10 minutes to settle before you serve.
Fried onion rings for garnishing
Vegetable oil, enough to have at least 1 inch in pan
1 medium-sized onion
Heat oil in small skillet over medium heat. Peel onion and slice very finely. Wipe onion rings with paper towels and drop into heated fat. As they fry, separate rings with slotted spoon. Fry until rich brown (they should be a rich dark brown without being burned!). Remove with slotted spoon and drain on paper towel. (This can be done ahead of time and the garnish left uncovered in a saucer.) Arrange onion rings over rice or meats.
Lentils
Frozen black-eyed peas (lobhia)
Chana masaledar
Canned chickpeas with garlic and ginger
Moong dal
Kala chana aur aloo (black chickpeas with potatoes)
Masoor or arhar dal with vegetables
Cold chana dal with potatoes
Hot chana dal with potatoes
Chana dal cooked with lamb
Karhi
Tomato karhi
Whole unhulled urad and rajma dal
Baris (or vadees) with eggplant and potatoes
SEE ALSO:
Dal soup
als—lentils or pulses—are varieties of dried beans and peas. In some form or other they are eaten daily in almost every Indian home, frequently providing the poor with their only source of protein. While people in England and America speak of making their living as earning their “bread and butter,” Indians who earn a bare wage complain that they make just enough for their “dal roti” (roti is bread).
Both the rice eaters and the wheat eaters of India consume dal with equal enthusiasm. Each state, however, cooks its dals in a completely different way. Punjab excels in whole, unhulled dals—whole urad and rajma cooked slowly in the clay oven (tandoor), as well as in chana bhatura, a spicy dish of chickpeas eaten with puffy deep-fried bread. The fussy Delhi-wallahs like the hulled and split moong dal, delicately spiced with cumin and sprinkled with lime juice and browned onions. In Bombay, a hot, sweet and sour toovar dal is made by the addition of tamarind paste and jaggery (a dry, lump variety of molasses) to the cooked dal. In Madras, the scorchingly spicy dal often contains vegetables—eggplant, okra, or tomatoes.
In America and England, where a very thin, liquidlike dal is often served in Indian and Pakistani restaurants, people have come to the conclusion that dal is a soup. Well, it isn’t; one of North India’s favorite expressions, “Dey dal may pani” (put water in the dal), refers to foods that are diluted in order to stretch them out among more people, a practice which is, naturally, deplored. A well-cooked dal is generally quite thick. It is hard to describe the exact consistency: it is thinner than a cooked cereal, but not quite as thin as pea soup. Having made that generalization, let me add that in some dal recipes the grains stay dry and almost whole, while in others, particularly some cooked in southern India, the dal is indeed quite soupy.
Dal is always eaten with rice or Indian breads. It can be poured over rice, especially when it is thin, or placed beside the rice, or half can be poured over the rice and the rest beside it on the plate.