Name: Toovar Dal with Green Mango
Yield: Serves 4 as a Main Course, 6 as a Side Dish
Cuisine: India
Ingredients: 1 teaspoon salt; 2 tablespoons raw sesame oil or vegetable oil; 2 to 3 green cayenne chiles, finely chopped; ½ teaspoon cumin seeds; 1 teaspoon minced ginger or ginger mashed to a paste; 1 cup finely chopped onion; 1 tablespoon minced garlic or garlic mashed to a paste; ¾ cup toovar dal, washed and picked over; 6 to 7 cups water; 1 large green mango (¾ to 1 pound), peeled, pitted, and cut into ½-inch dice; ½ teaspoon turmeric

Preparation info

Serves
4
as a Main Course

Difficulty
Easy

Appears in

Mangoes & Curry Leaves

By Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid

Published 2005

About

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