The Mystery of Mushy Mary

And a special request!

Before I start: I’m dying to hear how holiday cooking has been going! Would you write to me about yours? The highs? The lows? The successes and failures? Send them in, and I’ll share mine, and we can learn from each other!

Dear Tamar:

My mother was a cook of the sixties—meat, canned veggies and potatoes. When I married I learned to cook new things, but I’ve never been able to get lentils as good as the Indian restaurants I could visit—the rich flavors and their mastered texture. I’ve now happily bumped into beluga lentils. They’re more like rice, though. How should I be cooking the softer lentils to make them more like the Indian ones I love?

-Mushy Mary

Dear Mushy Mary,

There are two useful proverbs in the 16th century composer, Thomas Whythorne’s, autobiography. The first is: "He that wooeth a widow must not carry quick eels in his codpiece." The aphorism probably helped legions of prospective woo-ers and, depending on what a “quick eel” is, likely some of the woo-ed. The second, which he half-cribbed from Lucretius, is: “That which is one body’s meat is another’s poison.”

It’s the second saying that I find relevant to your question. I have five recommendations for making your lentils more like the exquisite ones at Indian restaurants. Four, though, have nothing to do codpieces or poison, but only with ingredients and process. The fifth, however, is philosophical. This is where Whythorne excels. I’ll start with the philosophical one.

Italian lentil recipes warn against mushiness and overcooking, recommending cooking lentils until tender, with the slightest resistance. Italian lentil varieties are bred with the aim in mind—whether lenticchie from Castelluccio di Norcia or those from Umbria. The same is true in French cuisine. Whether you’re cooking lentilles du puy or lentilles beluga, the goal is tender lentils that remain, discretely, lentils. This also holds in middle eastern mujadara—a combination of cooked lentils and grains; each lentil and grain remains distinct.

Indian lentils—all the varieties, which we know as various dals—must, on the other hand be mushy. Anecdotally, I can report that when I sent my south-Indian-born friend a photo of a lentil sambar I’d made, he enlarged the photo to inspect it for visible lentils, which would have made his mother, Gita, disqualify the dish. Non-anecdotally, here are excerpts from dal recipes I’ve used and loved. “Dal has to be soft cooked and mushy.” “Mash the cooked dal to suit your liking.” “We need soft and mushy lentils to make dal fry.”

The point I’m making—a variation on Whythorne’s—is that the quality one cuisine values, the other maligns, and vice versa. If you’ve learned to make European and Middle-eastern lentils, it can be hard to shift your perspective. But that is what you must do.

1. The first (or fifth) step to delicious Indian lentils is doing what would be poisonous to European and Middle-eastern lentil-cookery: add enough liquid (1 cup lentils to 4 cups liquid), and cook them so long that the result is mush. (You’ll reverse this thinking when you return to your belugas. But cross that bridge, hoping the water beneath is eel-less, when you reach it.) Steps 2-5 require less deep thinking. Here they are:

2. Dal should be cooked in at least two and up to three stages. First, cook the lentils until totally mushy, mashing with a masher or spoon if necessary, and adding more liquid for thinner dal. Then, make the first masala—or spice mixture—in a separate pan. This usually involves whole spices cooked in fat, onion, ginger, chilies, tomato, and sometimes garlic, and ground spices. (The three recipes I link to above list variations of this masala mixture.) Once it’s fully cooked, add this mixture to the mushy dal. That is the absolute simplest option—two stages. Better, to my mind, is to add a third stage. Make a tadka, starting with ghee and adding a mixture of whole spices, curry leaves, and ground spices, then pour it over the masala-spiced dal before serving. I don’t recommend free-styling with any of this: use the combinations advised in existing recipes.

3. Dal dishes like dal tadka are often made with a combination of lentils. They may include moong dal, a bit of chana dal, and toor dal for the bulk of the dish. A variety of lentils may also be included in the first masala mixture or the tadka, giving Indian restaurant dal a complexity and depth of flavor that’s only available if you, too, include a combination of dals.

4. Restaurant dal has a unique richness which I sought in my home-cooked dal for years, adding more and more ghee without finding the roundness I wanted. The reason, I’ve learned, is that the richness I sought doesn’t come from fat, but from crumbled, dried fenugreek leaves, or kasoori methi. There’s no substitute for the flavor of kasoori methi. I crumble the leaves into my dal after adding the masala mixture and before the tadka.

5. The other essential ingredient in great dal—and in many great Indian vegetable dishes—is asafoetida, or hing. There is much to say about the stuff. It’s a resin extracted from a rhizome. It smells putrid, maybe poisonous. A fingernail’s worth will transform a dish. It’s generally added to the tadka. It is, like kasoori methi, essential, and entirely irreplaceable.

Are there other secrets? Don’t skimp on fat or salt, or you’ll be dissatisfied. Don’t try to invent your own masala or tadka until you’ve gotten very good at making someone else’s. Don’t burn your garlic.

Dear cook, it’s rare that there’s such a direct approach to a problem. But here, there is. Take Whythorne’s advice—and, I think, ignore the rest of his oeuvre. From what I’ve read, his sonnets are low on meat and high on mush—great for dal, a disaster for poetry.