The Dal Cookbook

by Krishna Dutta

Authentic dalbased recipes from Kashmir to Kanyakumari!

Flavoured with history, spiced with authenticity and served with love… straight from the Indian kitchen.

Dal is to India what pasta is to Italy – cheap to produce, highly nutritional, suitable for long storage and capable of being cooked in myriad ways. This humble ingredient has been a staple in the diet of Indians and their neighbours for millennia. Across the subcontinent, it is consumed by rich and poor alike. High in protein and with practically no sugar, it is an essential for diabetics.

Dal can be cooked in courses of infinite variety – there are at least 50 recipes for this humble food. Discover the multiple delicious ways of cooking it, with wideranging seasonings and all the assorted supplements to serve with it. Relish the many flavourful variants dished out over the centuries by cooks experimenting with locally available ingredients to satisfy a regional palate. Including recipes of khichri, dosas, vadas, dhokla, papadam and pakoras, The Dal Cookbook lays out an extraordinary array of foods to be created and savoured.

Krishna Dutta is an author who specialises in Indian culture. She has assembled all the available dal recipes she could find from her native India and gives here for the first time the most comprehensive collection, organised regionally. She provides a fascinating historical and cultural context for her recipes making this book a pleasure to cook with as well as just read.

Genres: Cookbooks, Cooking, Food, Nonfiction, Reference

162 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 2, 2013

Reviews

[7jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book full of dal recipes. The dal are dishes - mainly vegetarian but there are a few non-vegetarian recipes included here - including protein-rich lentils, peas and/or beans. There's over 60 types of dal out there, this book mentions 10 (including white chickpeas and red kidney beans. Included is also a 'how to cook' them. :)

The ones that I found most tempting were: Punjabi Black Dal, Punjabi Nimbu Dal, Matar Peas And Paneer, Sambar, Lentil Kutu With Green Beans, Shahjahani Dal From Hyderabad, Moong Dal With Cauliflower, Warm Sprouting Moong Bean Dal.
There's also a recipe for the original 'kedgeree' (vegetarian), Bengali Khichuri. Looks very delicious in the accopanying photo :9

There is a bunch of color photos, but not for every dish. The dals are organised regionally (north-south-east-west), and there is some accompanying foods (like breads, raita and chutneys) in the end. A very well organised book with recipes from easy to quite challenging, it really makes you inspired to make some. Well worth owning for anyone interested.

[Justin Green · Rating 2 out of 5]

I do actually refer to this book quite regularly as there are some lovely recipes in there for anyone is wanting to expand their dal repertoire, as is the reason I purchased this book, but the majority of recipes don’t have images. Add to that the fact that none of the recipes detail how many people it’s meant to serve, I’d say it’s pretty sloppy.
I would like to know the meal I’m cooking is at least supposed to look and I do want some idea of how many portions I’m getting.
Pretty basic omissions for a cookbook I reckon

[Beth E · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a beautiful book. I love that it identifies the regions of India that each recipe comes from.
I do not like that it does not have pictures of every recipe. Okay, dal is not always the most photogenic food, but as I am learning about the cuisine, it is helpful to me to know what each recipe should look like.