Name: Watery Dhal
Ingredients: toor dhal; coriander seeds; vegetable oil; sugar; salt; turmeric; black mustard seeds; green chilli; tomatoes; asafoetida; lime juice; water; garlic; dried red chilli; fenugreek seeds; curry leaves; powdered cumin

Preparation info

Serves
4–5

Difficulty
Medium

Appears in

The Settler's Cookbook

By Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Published 2009

About

Ingredients

1 cup toor dhal, a kind of lentil
2 tbsp vegetable oil
½ tsp black mustard seeds
1 green chilli, cut half open, seeds left in
½ 400 g tin chopped tomatoes
¼ tsp asafoetida
Juice of a lime
2½ pts water
2 cloves garlic, sliced thinly
½ tsp fenugreek seeds
1 dried red chilli
Handful of curry leaves
2 tsp combined powdered cumin and coriander seeds
½ tsp turmeric
3 tsp sugar
Salt to taste

Method

Wash the dhal thoroughly and pick out any grit or foreign particles. Toor dhal, in particular, needs assiduous attention.
Boil the dhal, then simmer slowly in salted water in a saucepan over low heat for up to an hour, perhaps longer. It is ready when you can mash a grain easily with your fingers and thumb. When cooked, there should still be plenty of water in the pot. If there isn’t, add some from a just-boiled kettle.
Whisk the mixture with a hand whisk or, better still, an electric one.
Heat the oil and add red chilli, garlic, fenugreek and mustard seeds.
When they sizzle and pop, add the tomatoes and cook for a minute.
Then add the rest of the ingredients except the sugar and lime.
Cook slowly, stirring until the mixture thickens.
Add this to the dhal – be careful as there is some spluttering at this stage.
Chuck in the sugar and cook the dhal for another ten minutes.
Let it rest for ten minutes, then add the lime juice and serve in teacups.
You have a little rice on a plate which you eat while you sip the dhal.

Firoz, one of the old folk whose parents ran the dukans, told me, ‘The profit was so small, maybe we made two shillings a day. We were never unfair to Africans. That is not true at all. Our home in up country was like a shed for goats, nothing at all. Pit dug for the toilet. Flies always flying around the smelling hole. The floor was mud. Some hard beds and mattresses which we slept on, ate on, sat on and prayed on. And everyday same food, khichri, or rotli and watery dhal.’ Fatma, nearly ninety, remembered her deprivation and struggle: ‘Mosquitoes used to bite us everywhere and make us sick. My parents, you know making more children on the gunny sacks in the shop and it was not very good behaviour. My father made a lot of noise and my mother’s voice was like a lost kitten. She died when baby number fourteen got stuck. Good, she was free after that. Everything was in this small shop, tinned fish, Aspro, soda, biscuits, flour, rice, dhals, sugar, tea. But my father was stingy so we children only given small plate of rice and watery dhal.’²¹

Many families survived on rice served with a dollop of home made-yoghourt and watery dhal sipped piping hot from small cups. This is Fatma’s recipe.

Preparation info

Serves

Difficulty

Appears in

Ingredients

Method