This somewhat unappetizing grey mound was actually a very tasty soup whose warming and filling effects were appreciable for hours.
We blended the roast squash and sausage, but in the end, I think that just meant we lost soup to the blender. The soup was sweeter than expected, but the rustic sausage flavor and the tartness of the yoghurt helped to balance it well.
Dals and Soups
Dal… is the common name in the northern part of the Subcontinent for a dish that is made of split beans, peas, or lentils. Dal may be like a thin soup, or it can be a very thick puree. Often its texture is between the two, so that it’s a little like split pea soup. In most parts of the Subcontinent, the main meal includes dal, bread or rice, and a vegetable, so dal is one of the essential culinary categories. It’s a very flexible and creative one, too.
Dal dishes are very easy to cook, nutritious, and incredibly versatile and inexpensive, like the easiest of soups. For travelers in the Subcontinent, dal, like bread in Europe, can feel like a great friend, always available, sustaining.
Mangoes and Curry Leaves, Artisan 2005
Curry is the national British food, far surpassing pizza, kebabs, or burgers as a take out food. It is even more popular than fish and chips. That having been said, we haven’t had any Indian food out yet, we’ve been making our own. While we don’t know if our Indian dishes are authentically flavored, we have realized why their warm, spicy, and filling recipes are welcome in the cold months of late autumn in Britain.
On a student budget of an ever shrinking size, the easiest and most inexpensive meals we make are Indian dals, which we eat about once a week. Our dals are toor dals, that is, they are made with yellow split peas. While we usually spice our dals with turmeric, curry, mustard powder, salt and pepper, we have on occasion added bay leaves or cumin. The flavor and the texture of the dal depends a great deal on how long it cooks both prior to the addition of water and after the addition of water. The peas will toast slightly in a small amount of grease either with garlic and onion or by themselves before being immersed in water which causes them to swell and slowly break down. The longer a dal is cooked the darker and thicker it will get. Sometimes milk or yogurt is added toward the end of the cooking process which lends the dal a creamier texture and a bit of tang. We usually eat our dals over rice which has cooled to room temperature enjoying the contrast of the very hot dal to the cool rice.
Another dish we eat weekly is soup. Soup is comforting after the cold British rain which will drizzle all day or torrent briefly and then threaten menacingly all day without result. It is also convenient to leave simmering while we work upstairs, popping downstairs to give it a stir every fifteen minutes or so. Our favorite soups are potato and cauliflower. The cauliflower soup we make has such a creamy taste and is nothing like the florets you would dip into ranch. We were first inspired to make cauliflower soup back in September when reading the Becks and Posh blog on the decision between olive oil and butter in cauliflower soup. (We use butter.) Becks and Posh is modern cockney rhyming slang for ‘nosh’, as the blog so named is written by a Brit living in the SF Bay area. She gives a recipe in the article, which we follow… roughly. Basically we put oil, onion (when we remember), and cauliflower in the pan and cook for a little while, then we cover it with water and leave it cooking for twenty minutes. The we add more water and cook for another twenty minutes. If we were being fussy we would immersion blend it, but generally by that point we find that we are too hungry to bother. Besides, little bits of cauliflower which retain their texture are kind of nice, a rustic addition to the recipe, like mashed potatoes which are still slightly lumpy.
Our potato soups sometimes feature a bit of shredded braised cabbage or some “cooking bacon” which appears to be the “oops we cut that rasher wrong” shreds which are stuffed unceremoniously into plastic for a half pound less than the regular rasher. British bacon rashers are not the same as American bacon slices, they call those “streaky strips”. The difference is one of size and fat content, British rashers tend to be wider and to have fat along one edge, as opposed to the marbled appearance of American bacon, they are also what would be labelled as “thick‐cut” American bacon. Nonetheless, the adage remains true, almost everything is better with bacon.
A new soup we tried recently was a summer squash and polish sausage soup, which called for the named ingredients, heavy cream, and a handful of spices. We didn’t have any of those (exact) ingredients, but we did have a squash that was nameless and kind of old, some sale sausage that had been living in the same container as the bacon for several weeks, and some rather watery plain yoghurt. So I fried the sausage, roasted the squash, and boiled them together with salt and pepper. After a trip through the blender and a quick reheat, I dolloped the yoghurt on top and ended up with a striking and tasty dish.