Toovar Dal with Green Mango

This is a close approximation of a toovar dal dish I first tasted in a small village restaurant in mountainous Orissa, in the eastern part of India. The restaurant had two or three wooden tables and a thatched roof, and there was no choice about what to eat for lunch, only lunch itself. All I had to do was to sit down and lunch arrived, served on a beautiful “plate” made of round sal leaves knitted together with tiny slivers of wood. My meal was rice, a green mango dal, a mutton curr