Check Your Pulse

The best food movie of the past decade Ratatouille,which features a cartoon rat in a chefs hat turned on the point that its the simple dishes,the ones that have the breath of everyones childhood in them,that people,even the food critic at the films climax,really,really want to judge.

Not just because we know how,but because we recognise that perfection lies in knowing where to stop. Embellishments for dal,or roast chicken,dont add; they take away from its elegant simplicity.

Except dal isnt simple. Its just common.

Most of us dont get this at first. When I started cooking for myself,I told everyone not to worry. A bit of rice,a bit of dal,and I would be set,how hard could it possibly be? I went out and got a bit of dal,checked the proportion of the water,and sat back.

I got everything wrong. It came out mushy and bland,time and again.

Ah,thats because I was trying it out on the stove-top. Silly me. I had that miraculous machine,a microwave,didnt I? I tried in that too,and the lentils retained their individual identity rather than merging into a stodgy,lumpy mass. But the dal was an unappetising,pale shade.

Microwaves are newfangled western inventions unsuited for the subtlety of even the simplest of Indian foods,I told myself,and I went out and bought a pressure cooker. I failed every time,and turned slightly obsessive,worrying about tarka,overdoing the ginger and the haldi in turn. It never quite came out the way I wanted it.

And I discovered there are few solutions to dal dissatisfaction. You can try ordering out,of course. But every neighbourhood dhaba wants to send you their dal makhani,an abomination dreamed up on the highways of Punjab that has,like bhangra,gold-embroidered salwar kameez and sangeets at weddings,spread out to infect the rest of this country. Dal makhani is profoundly characterless: one look at a bowl in which a dozen distinct types of bean are indistinguishable can make the most optimistic of us have dark doubtful thoughts about assimilation and the melting pot of globalisation.

Who,when eating out,notices the dal? It is the ultimate afterthought when you order,the fries-with-that of the Indian restaurant. In most places,at least.

In search of a restaurant built on dal,I went to Dal Bukhara. The waiter,with that air of close association with US presidents that the staff at the Maurya are encouraged to possess,reminded me that Bill Clinton loved it,and had gone home to tell his wife,and now shed sent her boss to try it. Well,Clinton was a man of dubious tastes.

Not that the dal was bad. Far from it. It had a tanginess that worked both alone and as an accompaniment. And it was just creamy enough to keep me warm on the chilly ride home. And the price is worth it for beans that are no doubt grown in fields watered with single malt Scotch,and hand-sorted by a panel of Nobel laureates.

But I wasnt satisfied.

If you care about dal,you so rarely are. If youre from a wheat-eating culture,youre convinced the rice-eaters make it too watery. In Andhra Pradesh,they put spinach in it,which must be nice if you like spinach but less so if you like dal. And I once had the privilege of seeing a visitor from distant shores actually turn a pale shade of green at a Bengali wedding,when he saw a few glassy fish eyes staring back at him after he had dipped an unsuspecting spoon in the dish.

On that ride back from Bukhara,I thought of that critic in Ratatouille and how he was won over by the rat-chefs take on the uncomplicated yet difficult dish of the title. In Pixars evocative animation,the years rolled away,and the critic was a boy again. And that,the moment of blissful sensory memory,is what were searching for when were puzzled why nobody gets the simple dishes right. Everyone remembers their childhood dals as perfect,all the same,but they couldnt have been. Liberalisation changed almost everything,but I refuse to accept it changed dal.

I got home,opened the fridge and had a spoon of the cold dal Id made earlier. The ginger balanced the haldi,and you could taste the tej patta. Well,what do you know? It was perfect.

mihir.sharmaexpressindia.com