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Recipe: A Tasty, Tangy Dal – Tomato Pappu

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On our first wedding anniversary, decades ago now, my husband and I went out to dinner with our entire family. We went to a lovely fine dining restaurant in Chennai which serves South Indian fare. It was during this evening that I tasted tomato pappu for the first time. I relished it. While I have eaten it numerous times since, over the years – although not very frequently, because this is still a place that we save for special occasions – it took a long while before it occurred to me to try replicating it at home, which I did only recently. It surprised me to learn that at its heart tomato pappu is a very simple dish, using everyday ingredients and requiring a familiar preparation style. I’m glad to be able to share it with you too.

Tomato pappu is essentially a dal which has equal quantities of tomatoes and lentils. It originated in Andhra Pradesh. Telugu cuisine is not one I know much about, but I am eager to learn more, and I think this dish is a good place to start.

Interestingly enough, while I have lived in Tamil Nadu all my life, my mother had grown up in Vijayawada, in Andhra Pradesh. But when I first took her for a meal at this restaurant and ordered tomato pappu, it turned out to be her first exposure to it. While she spoke the language and knew the culture well, she had also been brought up in a very traditional Gujarati household and it was clear that Telugu food itself was a bit unfamiliar to her. It was lovely to introduce her to a dish from the region she grew up in. She had a curious mind that I inherited, and I remember her saying, “We should learn how to make this too.” Like me, she had absolutely loved it.

I went back to that restaurant recently, and only then did I decide to make good on my mother’s suggestion and finally learn to prepare tomato pappu. Although my dear mother is no longer around to enjoy it with me, the dish is imbued with so many memories over the years of celebratory meals with loved ones. Now that I have begun to make it at home, we will no doubt savour it more often, and it will come to be a part of even more of our experiences together.

As I sit here and write this post, my curious side emerges yet again, and I wonder whether the tomatoes can be replaced with some other vegetable. This is what I do all the time at home and for the re:store blog – innovating existing recipes while also exploring traditional ones. I’m thinking that carrots or perhaps spinach would be good substitutes. Both will certainly be healthy and tasty. I’ll keep you posted about how my experiments go, as always.

That’s the thing about cooking: one can get so very creative in the kitchen. Once you have mastered the basics, you can use your intuition and expand your repertoire. It’s all about having a sense of which ingredient might work, which flavour, what goes well with something or really doesn’t. For instance, I would not attempt a capsicum pappu as I am dubious about if that might work. At the same time, I’ve been marvellously surprised by dishes I’ve tasted around the world that bring seemingly incongruous elements together. The challenge is finding out what is complementary, through trial and error. Sometimes, though, you just know something will work, and it does.

When I think back to how I didn’t know anything about this delicious tomato pappu when I first tasted it, and couldn’t even identify its ingredients beyond tomatoes, I can see what a long way I have come in my culinary life. Now, this dish is no longer something I eat only at restaurants. It’s become something even better: a part of my regular meals.

Tomato Pappu
(Yield: Serves 2-4)

½ cup toor dal
2 cups water
2 medium-sized tomatoes
3 cloves garlic
A handful of curry leaves
Pulp from a lime-sized ball of tamarind
Salt to taste
½ teaspoon turmeric
1 teaspoon red chili powder
2 green chillies
1 tsp grated ginger
½ teaspoon asafoetida
2 teaspoons oil

Tempering
1 tablespoon ghee
1 teaspoon mustard seeds
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
¼ teaspoon asafoetida
1 dry red chili

Rinse and clean the dal. Add the dal to water and turmeric powder and pressure cook until tender. Set aside.

Heat a kadai. Add the oil. To this, add ginger, garlic, curry leaves, asafoetida, turmeric powder and salt. Sauté for a few minutes. Next, add the tamarind pulp. Allow to cook a little and then add the tomatoes.

Sauté until the tomatoes are tender. Mash it all well together.

Now, add the dal mixture and give it a good stir. Allow to cook a little. Set aside.

Prepare the tempering by adding ghee to a heated kadai, then adding all the remaining ingredients. Once the seeds splutter, add the tempering to the dal mixture.

Serve this tomato pappu hot, with rice. I also find that it pairs nicely with dosa or idiappam. If you’re a fan of dals or of South Indian cuisines more broadly, there are many more recipes on this blog for you to enjoy!

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Recipe: Learning Something New – Ginger Chutney

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For many years, a lovely lady named Hamsa has visited a few times a week, to conduct a chanting class for me. She teaches me Sanskrit scriptures like the Vishnu Sahasranamam and the Lalitha Sahasranamam. I’ve been chanting for the last fifteen years and it’s a source of immense solace for me. Hamsa is from Andhra Pradesh, a region known for its spicy cuisine, and it so happens that one of my favourite condiments comes from there. It’s a ginger chutney sweetened with a hint of jaggery, and I’m delighted to share the recipe for it with you today.

Before the pandemic, I was a frequent customer at a wonderful South Indian restaurant where an array of chutneys would be served. No matter how diverse the spread, I would always reach instantly for the ginger chutney, so much so that I’d even ask to have any leftovers of it packed to take back home and enjoy with the next meal. One day, as we were chatting after class, I asked Hamsa if she knew how to make that fabulous dish. I was thrilled to hear her say, casually, that she made it daily! Of course, she then kindly brought me some a couple of times, after which I asked that she teach me the recipe. I’m a hands-on learner and I wanted to watch her preparing the dish. So one day when she visited, she prepared it in my kitchen as I eagerly watched the process, and I’ve been making it happily ever since.

I believe that we all experience learnings from any person. It doesn’t matter who they are, or in what form the learning comes, but it enriches us just the same. This is something that’s so crucial for us to keep in mind at this difficult time for India. If we keep our eyes and our minds open, we will perceive that all of life itself is a learning, and that we are amidst so many ongoing lessons given what is happening is the country and the world. We are learning about what works and what doesn’t, and what has to change for a better future. In our personal lives and relationships, we are learning something every day about how to get through this crisis – seeing which relationships can withstand it and how, seeing sometimes that the problem isn’t the other person but us, and so much more. These are valuable learnings that we must carry forward.

I’m grateful to have learnt this recipe from Hamsa, to add to all the knowledge she has given me over the years spiritually. She doesn’t just teach me chants, but also talks about culture and ritual, deepening my understanding of the same. When I’m feeling down, she will often suggest a mantra that I can say to strengthen myself. This is advice that has kept me in good stead through my adversities.

I’m sharing the recipe for ginger chutney with you today along with a slice of my life. After I have completed my baking, cooking and exercise schedule in the morning, I always sit down to chant. I genuinely believe in prayer, and in the power of hope. I believe that as a human race we will come out of this darkness, and when I am in prayer, my conviction in this is at its strongest.

With the current lockdown in Chennai, I now take virtual classes from Hamsa daily. I can read Sanskrit, and one of the things I appreciate about her teaching style is that she is very particular about pronunciation. This takes me back to when I was a little girl in a convent school full of wonderful Irish nuns, who insisted on precision in handwriting and enunciation. The lovely Mrs. Martanda, my English teacher, would teach us the difference between the spoken words “vow” and “wow”, for example. She used the Wren and Martin grammar book and various dictionaries as teaching tools. That I am able to recall these details decades on is a testament to the influence a good teacher can have, in any aspect of life. As I said earlier: we learn something from someone, every day. We are all students, and we are all teachers.

And so – I learnt this from Hamsa and I am now teaching it to you. It’s a brilliant ginger chutney made in the Andhra style. My version is drier than Hamsa’s, and I make it this way so that it lasts longer. It has a perfect combination of flavours – sweet jaggery, spicy red chilli and piquantly aromatic ginger, the last one being a particular favourite of mine. It’s so Indian, yet so doable in any part of the world, consisting of simple ingredients and a quick and easy process. In case you cannot source jaggery, try brown sugar or coconut sugar as a substitute. This ginger chutney lifts up the flavours of my Buddha bowls, my dhoklas, my dosas… it adds such a sumptuous taste to anything I pair it with.

Ginger Chutney

(Yield: 1 cup)

2 small cups washed, finely cut ginger

1 small (lime-sized) ball tamarind

8 dry red Kashmiri chillies

2 tablespoons urad dal

Salt to taste

2 teaspoons cumin seeds

2 tablespoons jaggery powder

2 tablespoons sesame oil

 

Add the oil to a pan. Dry roast all the ingredients – except the jaggery – until they all turn golden, on a medium flame. Finally, add the jaggery.

Allow to cool. Blend well together without adding any water. You can store this in the refrigerator for 10-15 days. As a dry chutney, it is inherently more long-lasting.

I’d love to know how you’ve been pairing the various dips I’ve been sharing. The previous two in this Indian condiments series were the Tamil-style raw mango thovayal and the Gujarati-style dry garlic chutney. In the past, I’ve also shared several fusion and Indian dips and condiments, all of which can be used creatively, and I hope you’ll be curious about exploring those too. Here they are: curry leaf and green chilli hummus, plum chutney, wood-apple chutney, coriander chutney and date chutney. Enjoy!

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Recipe: A Story From The School Lunchbox – Spinach Rice

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When my daughter was in school, I would send her off every day with a lunchbox that contained as much variety as possible. Whether it was noodles, pizza or something else, I always made her something delicious – but with a healthy twist. Her best friend, a girl from Andhra Pradesh, brought her mother’s spinach rice in her own lunchbox every day. And the girls would exchange lunchboxes. My daughter loved that traditional spinach rice, and her best friend couldn’t get enough of my cooking experiments! When I discovered what was going on, I simply started packing extra of whatever I sent her, so both girls could eat more of our homemade meals.

Recently, this friend visited us, and the girls sat with me and reminisced about the good old days of their childhoods. Soon, they got to talking about the lunchbox swaps, and my daughter was nostalgic, saying how much she missed that spinach rice. As it is made of affordable and readily available ingredients, some variation of spinach rice is a staple in households all over the country. “Spinach” is an entire category of leafy greens. In South India, there are so many kinds available that certain dishes are matched according to the tastes of each. For instance, in Tamil Nadu, the thick small leaves of paruppu keerai (literally “dhal spinach”) go with dhal, the smaller leaves of siri keerai (“little spinach”) taste good with garlic, and are usually stir-fried with the same, and so on. What is known as dill rice in the West is also a kind of spinach rice here.

Spinach, as the cartoon character Popeye popularised, is great for developing a strong and healthy body. It is a muscle-builder, and packed with vitamins, calcium, antioxidants and other nourishing elements. It’s also collagen-rich, which means your skin and hair benefit from it. It is typically the kind of leafy green that kids resist eating, as some kinds are bitter, which is why I was so happy to find out about my daughter’s lunchbox exchanges long ago!

In my previous post, I mentioned a nifty slicer I picked up on my travels, and while these modern conveniences are much enjoyed, I still trust and hold on to our time-honoured appliances. For instance, I have the traditional Tamil aruvamanai, a hooked grater meant to be used while seated on the floor. The lovely thing about such devices is that they are durable in a way that modern devices, especially plastic ones, just aren’t. While this is mostly part of the décor, I’m not averse to using it when I want to. What better way to recreate a nostalgic dish than by using an antique appliance? I pulled out the old aruvamanai and sliced the spinach leaves for this recipe with it…

 

Spinach Rice

(Yield: 4-5 cups)

Ingredients
1 tomato
1 onion
2 cups spinach leaves
¾ cups raw rice
2 tablespoon mung dal
1 tooth garlic
1 green chilli
¼ teaspoon turmeric
¼ teaspoon cumin seeds
¼ teaspoon mustard seeds
1 tablespoon oil
Salt to taste

In a pressure cooker, add the spinach leaves, mung dal, onion, tomato, turmeric, chili, garlic, salt and 3 cups of water. Allow to cook for 2 whistles. In case you do not want to use a pressure cooker, you may cook the same ingredients covered with a lid on a medium flame, until well-cooked and soft to the touch.

Meanwhile, wash and soak the rice in water.

In a pan, add oil, then the cumin seeds and mustard seeds. Once they splutter, add the washed raw rice.

Now, open the cooled pressure cooker. Add the washed and soaked rice to the spinach and allow them all to cook for two more whistles. The spinach rice is now ready.

Serve hot – or in a lunchbox, for your growing children, who may surprise you with their tastes!

The Telugu cuisine of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana is known for being spicy, and the spinach rice recipe above, generously shared by my daughter’s friend’s mother, is no different. My daughter says that it tastes just like she remembered it from school. It’s in the original style, of course, but I must take credit for the most special ingredient – her mother’s love!

 

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