When I hear ‘Dal Chawal’ the first word which comes to my mind is ‘comfort food’.

Comfort food is food that provides a nostalgic or sentimental value to someone, and may be characterized by its high caloric nature, high carbohydrate level, or it may be a simple preparation. The nostalgia may be specific to an individual, or it may apply to a specific culture.

We are now citizens of global village, the world has “shrunk”, and we are a single community linked by social media and telecommunication. Due to this food has travelled across cultures & continents. We have array of comfort foods at our disposal which go well beyond dal chawal. We’ve embraced comfort foods of other cultures. It may be Chicken soup or mashed potato or hot chocolate. I am from India & my comfort food list also includes Penne Pasta tossed in Arrabiata sauce fresh off the pan!

I am an Indian at heart & sometimes all I want is dal chawal.

Even when I go outside to have a meal at an Indian restaurant what I crave for is Jeera Rice & Dal Tadka or maybe Dal Khichdi; the most basic, earthy lentil dish. At home, a bowl of dal tempered with spices is an all time favourite.

Dal Basics

Dal is often considered to be “lentils” but actually it refers to a split version of a number of lentils, peas, chickpeas & kidney beans etc. If a pulse is split into half, it is a dal. For example, split urad/black gram is known as urad dal.

Indian pulses are usually available in three versions: the whole pulse, the split pulse with the skin on the outside, and the split pulse without the skin.

The word ‘dal’ denotes a split pulse, but in India it actually includes all dried beans and lentils, as well as dishes in which they are the chief ingredient. Dals can also include vegetables, sometimes even meat. The critical factor about them is its creaminess. The pulses are simmered for a long time or it is quickly pressure cooked until they collapse into a purée. The tempering or tadka is what completes a dal. Every part of India has its own set of flavourings & tempering.

Here I have a few dals to showcase from my kitchen with their English names & Hindi names in bracket. I hope this will help you to not get confused with the names & their types.

Origin of Dal Bhat or Dal Chawal

Though we Indians devour Dal Bhat every day we rarely would have thought about its origins. Shockingly the combination of Dal Bhat has not originated in India! Yes that’s true!

Though Dal Chawal has become a staple of the typical Indian diet but this combination was invented in Nepal!

Even if it’s a Nepali dish there isn’t a state of India which doesn’t have its own version of dal and rice cooked separately, and then accompanied on the plate with pickle, sabji or curd. While they all have an earthy creaminess in common, the fragrant tempering of spices used in each gives them distinctly unique flavours that simply cannot be compared.

The origin of Dal Bhat lies in the misty Himalayas and thus, has a big impact on mountaineering in the area. Around the Everest base camp, dal bhat is the only meal served in food stalls. It is so closely related to mountaineering that climbers often figure out each day’s trek by the number of servings needed to complete it, such as a “2 dal bhat” climb or a “4 dal bhat” for something really arduous.

Our Dal Heritage

Dal is a nutritious, humble meal served with rice, or it may be just one of several dishes served as part of a more complex meal. It is found on every Indian table every day, rich or poor.

If you are a die-hard fan of the humble Indian dal, delve into some interesting tales about this delicious dish.

If there is one ingredient with which India, shares an umbilical-like connection, it has to be lentils or dals. History talks about dal recipes as old as the pre-Harappa culture, where lentils of all kinds; were a staple food.

Dals were in the menu even before rice and wheat arrived in India and became an indispensable part of the Indian thali (Dal was part of India’s daily diet but the combination of dal rice originates from Nepal).

In fact, it’s astounding that most of the dal tempering doesn’t have the culinary quintessential tomatoes indicates that dal existed during the earlier days of Ayurveda, and hence the oldest of the recipes.

This fact is backed by old texts; that usually mentions simple recipes of dal that was served to guests as a celebratory meal. It’s believed that a special kind of chana dal was prepared for the auspicious occasion of Chandragupta Maurya’s wedding with Greek Princess Helen of Troy in 303 BC. The recipe that was as a culinary masterpiece due to the burst of flavours each spoon delivered; was Ghugni – a lentil preparation that is still prevalent in East India and can be often found being sold in street side shops as breakfast.

Another dal which was loved by the royals was the Panchratna Dal / Panchmel Dal; but the time it entered into the Indian culinary scene is a fact that is hard to ascertain, as little is known about the origin of this lentil preparation.

However, many believe that the first mention of the Panchratna Dal was in Mahabharata. It is said that it was one of the preparations that Kunti and thereafter Draupadi, would prepare as an addition to the elaborate royal cuisine, and also to fulfill the Pandavas need of nutrition, during their exile. People in East India talk about how Bhim after accidentally making the aviyal in King Virat’s royal kitchen also created the first Panchratna Dal by boiling five dals in a pot and garnishing it with loads of ghee. Interestingly, it was Bhim, who gave this blend of 5 dals a name called ‘panchratna’ or five gems, which was appropriate as dal in ancient India was considered an important ingredient of every kitchen.

The Panchmel dal came into limelight from the Mewar Gharana, where it was introduced because of the need to give subtle flavour to dishes to balance out the fiery flavours that were dominating the table. This lentil dish was so full of flavour that when Jodha Bai married Akbar, she introduced it into the predominantly non-vegetarian Mughal kitchen, along with a handful of other vegetarian dishes.

This simple, nutritious and subtly flavoured mix of five lentils – moong dal, chana dal, toor dal, masoor dal and urad dal – that makes up the panchmel dal which was one of Jodha Bai’s favourite dishes.

The marriage of the lentils and spices was such a hit that by the time Shah Jahan took over the throne, the Mughal court had a Shahi Panchmel Dal recipe that had become a month feature, and was often demanded by Aurangzeb, who was a strict vegetarian, fancied the dish more than roast meat.

By the medieval times, the Indian culinary world had progressed to combining two to three dals together. One of the finest examples of the same is the Kali dal that went on to evolve into Dal Makhani thanks to Kundal Lal Gujral, who also invented the famous Butter Chicken.

Kundan Lal wanted to create a ‘shahi’ dal that would go well with the rich non-vegetarian food served at his restaurant Moti Mahal. He had already perfected the tomato and cream based gravy for the butter chicken and decided to use the recipe in combination with urad dal (black gram), chana dal (bengal gram) and rajma (kidney beans). The combination proved to be a masterstroke, and the celebrated dal makhni was born.

Another type of dal that has an interesting history is the Moradabadi dal. It is made of moong dal, this culinary gem first came to prominence when Prince Murad Baksh (the third son of Shah Jahan) established the city of Moradabad in 1625.

Murad was very fond of Rajasthani toor dal just like his great grandfather Akbar and ordered his cooks to create something as light yet satisfying. It was during these attempts that a cook by fluke discovered that cooking moong dal on slow flame can result in a dish that is slightly sweet, smooth and just as flavourful as toor dal. He served it in a bowl made of dried betel nut leaf with a garnish of amchur (dried mango powder), chopped onions and green chillies. The prince is said to have liked it so much that he had it three times a day. And this was how Moradabadi dal came into existence. Even today, this dish is consumed like a snack than a part of the main course and is served with a variety of garnishes, just the way how the cook introduced the dish to Murad!

Get Dal Rice into Spotlight

Let’s pay attention to what top Nutritionist Rujuta Diwekar has to say about Dal Chawal in her book called Indian Superfoods: Change the way you eat.

Globalisation has lead to blindly accepting nutritional culture—guidelines, diets, eating habits—from the developed world; all of which adds to the epidemic of obesity hitting our country.

Doctors who study nutrition for a few weeks give us a nutrient-based guideline. So we come back home with advice that says ‘eat protein, avoid sugar, limit fat intake’—we are basically confused about what food we should actually eat and avoid. So we switch to oats for breakfast at the expense of poha, soup instead of dal chaawal and eat Marie biscuits with a sugarless chai.

Soups are not a traditional part of our diet; they never needed to be. Vegetables lose nutrients with heat, whereas pulses retain it. Thus, our native cultures have a liquid preparation of dals, and not of vegetables.

Consuming idli-chutney, dosa-sambar or dal rice gives us a vegan, gluten- free, complete protein diet, but it doesn’t sound as sexy & stylish as quinoa salad with cranberries, for example. Traditional foods also promoted diet diversity. Depending on where you came from, you might eat paratha, poha or idli for breakfast. Now we all eat oats or muesli whether we are Maharashtrian or Punjabi or Malayali.

The outmoded roti-sabzi, bhakri-sabzi, dal-rice, etcetera, is a infallible way of getting good nourishment, it will also help us to be sensitive to local economies The grandmother and her common sense is the repository of this knowledge, way ahead of its time. It’s the first open data source that we are exposed to and it also does not even need WiFi to download. Will we pay attention? That’s the only question.

I recently went through an article in HT Brunch dated 23^rd Dec 2017 ‘Indian Cuisine is also Global Cuisine’ by Vir Sanghvi, a renowned food critic; says that at some subliminal level – we believe that Indian is not one of the world’s great cuisines.

We Indians feel that only Indians can actually cook our food, because of which our cuisine will always remain an inferior one, good only for restaurants in the Indian ethnic category. We ridicule foreigners who try and cook Indian food. Why are we not like the French who take pride in the spread of their cuisine?

One reason why Indian food has not reached the level of a global cuisine is because we have considered it as a secret cuisine that only Indians can cook. Whenever anybody from anywhere else in the world tries to cook Indian food, we smirk and act as though we are the ones who are carrying the secrets of Indian cuisine in our DNA and that nobody who is not genetically Indian can even understand the complexities & flavours of Indian food.

Indians may take a little longer to accept that idea. But there are some good signs. At Gaggan, which is Asia’s best restaurant and the only Indian restaurant in the world with two Michelin stars, the kitchen staff is completely international: 23 nationalities are represented. And Gaggan’s second-in-command, who has helped in creating many of the dishes, is an Indonesian & not an Indian!

We need the world to realise that, Indian cuisine is also a global cuisine, one that any good chef can master.

We should stop claiming that only Indians know how to make sabzi or dal, will our cuisine get the global recognition it deserves?

Let’s learn to respect Indian cuisine & also help others in the world to cook & delve into the flavours of rich and diverse Indian cuisine. I hope we see Indian cuisine bask in the glory on a global level.

Don’t you think that the unstylish Dals has to be on our plates & bowls more often as compared to the processed food.

We can just take a small step by creating a #dalrevolution (Follow @sonal_myfoodcarousel on Instagram to know more). Let’s click a picture of dal & nominate 2 of your friends to also post a picture of this flavourful dish. No, it’s not necessary to cook it by yourself. It’s okay if you are having it at a restaurant; or busy sipping dal off a bowl made by your mom or friend or brother. Do use the hashtag #dalrevolution & tag @sonal_myfoodcarousel

Let us pledge to make Indian cuisine, a global cuisine.

Stay tuned for some flavourful recipes of dals from my kitchen!

References:

http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/dishes-you-thought-were-indian-but-are-not-rajma-dal-chawal-gulab-jamun-jalebi-samosa-biryani-lifefd/1/802563.html

http://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/food-wine/food-story-the-saga-of-panchmel-dal/

https://www.thebetterindia.com/92642/food-history-dal-lentils-india/

https://food.ndtv.com/food-drinks/history-of-dal-makhani-what-went-into-revolutionizing-the-face-of-kali-dal-for-north-indians-forever-1718047

http://www.oneingredientchef.com/dal-bhat/

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/05/dining/the-how-and-why-of-dal.html

https://www.indiatimes.com/culture/food/the-heartbreaking-truth-about-indian-foods-that-are-not-indian-at-all-225103.html

https://thegoodfork.me/2016/04/11/dal-bhat-power-24-hour/

http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/living/diet-in-praise-of-dal-rice

http://indiaphile.info/guide-indian-lentils/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/food-and-drink/recipes/best-slow-cooked-dal-recipes/

http://www.hindustantimes.com/brunch/indian-cuisine-is-also-global-cuisine/story-nm6VXyB624ei5Ku3XZIbpO.html