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Dal, or Dhal
Boil half a pint of lentils in one quart of water until quite soft and pulpy; set them aside. Cut up an onion into thin rings, fry it in one ounce of butter, and add to it two table-spoonfuls of curry sauce (see CURRY SAUCE). Then put in your lentils, boil for about twenty minutes, and serve with a dish of plain boiled rice. Probable cost, 6d.
A straightforward lentil dish that needs only a few conversions and one adjustment to the cooking method.
- Half a pint of lentilsBritish imperial measure: 10 fl oz, so roughly 1¼ cups dry lentils. The quart of water is 40 fl oz, about 5 cups — a generous ratio that gives the "pulpy" texture intended.
- Which lentilThe recipe does not say. Both whole brown/green lentils, which hold some shape and take 30–40 minutes, and split red lentils (masoor dal), which collapse in about 20 minutes, were available to a Victorian cook; the split red gives the smoother, pulpier result the name suggests.
- Curry sauceThe cross-reference is to a made sauce rather than dry powder, though its exact composition is not given on this page; Victorian curry sauces were generally stock-based and thickened, and two tablespoons of one is a mild seasoning. Substituting two tablespoons of dry curry powder would be far too much; use a prepared sauce, or bloom about two teaspoons of curry powder in the butter with the onion.
- SaltNone is called for anywhere in the method. Lentils cooked plain in water are flat; salt them once they are soft, and taste again after the curry sauce goes in.
- The second boilTwenty minutes of boiling after the lentils are already pulpy is longer than needed and risks catching on the base. Ten minutes at a bare simmer, stirring, is enough to marry the sauce and drive off excess liquid.
- Frying the onionAn ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons. Take the onion rings past translucent to genuinely browned at the edges — that colour is most of the flavour in a dish this spare.
- YieldServes four as a side with rice, or two as a main. Probable cost is given as 6d.
Dal entered British cookery through the Anglo-Indian households of the Raj, and by the time Cassell's Dictionary was compiled it had settled into the standard repertoire of "curry" accompaniments alongside chutney and boiled rice. The word simply means split pulses in Hindi and related languages, and by extension the dish made from them; the double spelling in the title reflects the unsettled transliteration of the period, when the same book might print dhal, dal and even dholl. What is striking here is the route the seasoning takes: rather than tempering whole spices in hot fat, as an Indian cook would, the recipe reaches for a pre-made English curry sauce. That substitution is the whole history of Victorian curry in a single line, a dish assembled out of the fittings of a British kitchen.