Dal, Not Boring

Vir Sanghvi's Rude Food is an occasional staple of my weekend reading. To get to it is not always a cakewalk, though — one must navigate past other HT Brunch features that are often hopelessly inane. Of course, Shri Sanghvi himself, his broad repertoire on his sleeve, is capable of giving any self-respecting foodie more than enough cud to chew. Frequently, his fare is extravagantly esoteric in choice of subject and idiom, more daunting than delectable for the average seasoned traveller. Yet, when confining himself to playing patron versus patronising, his entrée does justice to his vaunted gourmand credentials — even the pungency of his strong opinions tickles the buds and makes for mild intellectual exercise appropriate for Sunday mornings. In either case, the studiedly exclusivist stance is unmistakable.

This week, though, Rude Food was positively brilliant. It swung the spotlight on humble, ubiquitous dal, justly extolling its virtues as the quintessential Indian dish. As Sanghvi points out, though content to play second fiddle to other offerings, the dal does not suffer from a lack of variety. All forms of Indian cuisine profess a version and each civilisation coming into contact with it has enriched its canon. At one level, it is in fact quite interesting how hard-pressed one would be to find dal-oriented eateries when one considers how every household carries its individual specimen — and even the occasional cook's experiments have elevated its pantheon. (My mother for instance, not exactly given to much adventurism in the kitchen, still cooks a memorable dal, and so one would suspect for many mothers, spouses, and chefs of varying culinary expertise across the nation.)

However, there is one facet that Shri Sanghvi barely scratches the surface of — owing, perhaps, to his proclivity for intellectual snobbery, or simply his relative munificence. This is the continued spiral of rising dal prices and its clearly deleterious consequences on household budgets (one speaks equally from personal experience, of course). In fact, this has worried no less a body than the RBI, going by the commentary in its Q2 FY11 Monetary Policy Review. Well merited as it may be, it is too early in the weekend to attempt this fuller discussion tonight. Let me, therefore, leave that for later — perhaps tomorrow, after being fortified with my ritual Saturday khichdi lunch!