Asian

In much of India, a fresh salad is present at every single meal. This kind of cucumber salad was something that my mother threw together moments before we sat down to eat. Cucumbers with tiny undeveloped seeds have the best texture, but when cucumbers are growing wildly in my garden and some that hid themselves too successfully among the leaves have grown beyond the best picking size, I pick them anyway, peel them, and scoop out their seeds. They still make good eating. (Whenever I pick a particularly large, overgrown cucumber, I can never throw it in the compost heap because I think of Inder Dutt. At the age of thirteen, he came down from a poor village in the Himalayan mountains to try to eke out a living in the plains. In Delhi, he somehow managed to get into a cousin’s household where they taught him how to do odd jobs and eventually even how to cook. He became so adept that my cousin brought him to New York as her cook. Every now and then he would come over to our apartment to help out. I could never get enough of the stories about his childhood. He had spent the snowy mountain winters without shoes, huddling in the floor above the animals to stay warm at night. In the summers, he had to go work in the fields. When he got very thirsty, he would just pick the largest cucumber he could find, snap it in two, and quench his thirst with its juicy flesh.)

A chapati is like a tortilla. Unlike a corn tortilla, it is made out of wheat flour. Unlike a wheat tortilla, it is made out of whole-wheat flour known as ata or chapati flour. You may use a tortilla press or a chapati press (they are almost the same) instead of rolling each one out with a rolling pin. Small thin chapatis (about 5 inches in diameter) are considered much more elegant than large thick ones, though you will find all sizes in the cities and villages of India. Those who eat chapatis daily eat them with everything at lunch and dinner. You break off a piece and enfold a piece of meat or vegetable in it. If you want to spice up the morsel a bit more, you brush it against a chutney or pickle. You could also roll up some food inside a whole chapati, to make a kind of “wrap,” though you would not do this at the table, only with leftovers to make a snack.

The dough for the paratha is similar to that of a poori but is rolled out very differently to give it multiple layers. It is cooked on a cast-iron griddle rather like a pancake, with butter, ghee, or oil to keep it lubricated. This particular paratha, among the simplest to make, is triangular in shape. Parathas are a very popular breakfast food when they are eaten with yogurt and pickles. They may also be served at mealtimes with meats and vegetables.

A poori requires almost the same dough as the chapati, except there is a little oil in it. It is rolled out almost the same way too, but then, instead of being cooked on a hot, griddle-like surface, it is deep-fried quickly in hot oil, making it puff up like a balloon. (When the same bread is made with white flour, as it is in Bengal, it is called a loochi.) Pooris may be eaten with all curries and vegetables. At breakfast, pooris are often served with potato dishes—such as Potato and Pea Curry or Potatoes with Cumin and Mustard Seeds—and hot pickles and chutneys. They are eaten very much like chapatis—you break off a piece and roll some vegetable in it, then brush it against a pickle or chutney. We always took them on picnics with us, all stacked up inside a tin. On picnics and train journeys, they were eaten with ground-meat dishes and pickles, all at room temperature.

Throughout southern India and Sri Lanka fine, homemade, steamed rice noodles are often served at mealtimes instead of rice and are known as idiappam (or string hoppers) in India and idiappa in Sri Lanka. Since making them is somewhat cumbersome, requiring a special mold and steaming equipment, I do the next best thing: I buy dried rice sticks from East Asian grocers and reconstitute them. These noodles could be served at breakfast with a little sugar and cardamom-flavored coconut milk and at major meals with curries—though in Sri Lanka I have had them with fish curries for breakfast to my great delight, and with fiery fish curries in Kerala for dinner.

This South Indian–style dish may also be made with shredded cabbage. Dried rice sticks are sold by East Asian grocers. You will notice that a little raw rice is used here as a seasoning. It provides a nutty texture. Serve with a lamb or beef curry or grilled meats.

Here is one of the great offerings from Kerala, a state on the southwest coast of India, where it is known as uppama. The semolina that is required here is a coarse-grained variety that is sold as sooji or rava in the Indian stores or as 10-minute Cream of Wheat in the supermarkets. (It is not the very fine version used to make pasta.) This pilaf-like dish may be eaten as a snack with tea, for breakfast with milky coffee and an accompanying coconut chutney (see Sri Lankan Cooked Coconut Chutney), or as part of a meal as the exquisite starch.

South Asians do not really eat brown rice, but many people in South India, western coastal India, and Sri Lanka enjoy a very nutritious red rice. The grains have a red hull that is only partially milled. This is eaten plain and also ground into flour to make pancakes and noodles. This recipe works for all the brown rices available in the West, and may be served with all South Asian meals.

Here is a recipe I have devised for the brown rices (and mixtures that combine brown rice with wild rice) usually found in Western markets. Served with vegetables and a yogurt relish, it makes a fine vegetarian meal. You may also serve this with meat and fish curries.

There are hundreds of versions of this salad-like dish that are eaten throughout South India and parts of western India as well. At its base is rice, the local starch and staple. (Think of the bread soups of Italy and the bread salads of the Middle East.) The rice is cooked so it is quite soft. Then yogurt, and sometimes a little milk as well, is added as well as any fruit (apple, grapes, pomegranate), raw vegetables (diced tomatoes, cucumbers), or lightly blanched vegetables (green beans, zucchini, peas) that one likes. The final step is what makes the salad completely Indian. A tiny amount of oil is heated and spices such as mustard seeds, curry leaves, and red chilies are thrown into it. Then the seasoned oil is poured over the rice salad to give it its pungency and reason for being. This cooling, soothing dish, somewhat like a risotto, makes a wonderful lunch. It is best served at room temperature, without being refrigerated. Other salads may be added to the meal.

Bulgar, a wheat that has been cooked, cracked, and dried, is used in parts of the Punjab (northwestern India) to make a variety of nutritious pilafs. The coarser-grained bulgar is ideal here. Serve as you would a rice pilaf.

This is such a soothing rice dish—slightly sweet and salty, with just a hint of black pepper. (Do not eat the peppercorns. Push them to the side of your plate. They are just for flavoring.) As the dish is South Indian, I have made it with jasmine rice, which is closer in texture to the shorter-grained rices commonly found in that region. I love to serve this with northern lamb and chicken curries, thus breaking tradition and combining north and south in an exciting new way.

A refreshing rice dish that may be served with vegetables, bean and split-pea dishes, and chutneys. Sometimes, I just eat it all by itself with a large green salad.

One of the oldest Indian dishes and continuously popular these thousands of years is khichri, a dish of rice and split peas. (Starting around the Raj period, the British began to serve a version of khichri in their country homes for breakast: they removed the dal, added fish, and called it kedgeree.) There are two general versions of it: one is dry, like well-cooked rice, where each grain is separate, and the other is wet, like a porridge. Both are delicious. The first is more elegant, the second more soothing. This is the first, the dry version. Serve it like rice, with all manner of curries.

Jasmine rice is very different in texture and taste from basmati rice. It is more clingy, more spongy, and more glutinous and, at its best, has a jasmine-like aroma. On some days it is exactly the soothing rice I yearn for. It is certainly closer to the daily rice eaten in South, East, and West India, where basmati rice is reserved for special occasions only. Look for good-quality jasmine rice, usually sold by Thai and other Oriental grocers. Sadly, price is often a good indication of quality. I usually do not bother to wash it, as I enjoy its slightly sticky quality.

Lemon grass is grown on the edges of the more precipitous slopes of Sri Lanka’s numerous tea gardens. Some of these plantations are visible from the front patio of Ena’s mountain bungalow. Lemon grass keeps insects away, and its long roots hold back the soil. I had this aromatic and festive dish in the museum-like home of Sri Lankan batik artist Ena de Silva, where it was served with dozens of curries and relishes. You may serve this at banquets and family meals alike. It goes well with coconut-milk-based curries, such as Kerala-Style Chicken Curry.

A delicious pilaf that may be served with most Indian meals.

The Indian split peas, arhar dal and toovar (or toor) dal, are closely related. Both are the hulled and split descendants of the pigeon pea. Arhar, the North Indian version, is milder in flavor, whereas toovar, used in West and South India, tends to be darker and earthier. Use whichever you can find. If you cannot find either, use yellow split peas. Serve with rice or Indian flatbreads. Add a vegetable and relishes to complete the meal. Non-vegetarians may add meat or fish, if they like.

This is a Bengali specialty that requires that the moong dal (hulled and split mung beans) be lightly roasted first and then, when the dal is almost done, quick-cooking greens such as mustard greens, spinach, or green chard are added to make it more nourishing. There are several tiny steps required here, but each is simplicity itself. I find that most split peas and beans are so clean these days that they need no picking over. You do need to rinse them off. In the case of this recipe, the rinsing is done after the roasting, for obvious reasons. Bengalis might use mustard oil for the final seasoning. It complements the mustard greens and adds its own unique flavor. But since it is frowned upon by Western food authorities for the harmful acids it contains, I have started using extra virgin olive oil instead, another strong flavor, though a different one. For many peasants, such a dal, served with rice and perhaps followed by a yogurt dessert, makes for a rich, ample meal. You may add a fish dish.

I have only eaten this slightly sweet and slightly sour dish in Gujarat, and how good it was, too. It isn’t just corn grains that are cooked in the dal but the cob itself, lopped off into reasonably sized rounds. The woody part of the cob flavors the dal in mysterious ways. You just cannot pick up these corn pieces with Western cutlery. Hands are required to eat the corn off the dal-and-spice-flavored cob sections. If you cannot find toor dal (also labeled toovar dal and arhar dal), use any other split peas that you can find easily, such as red lentils or yellow split peas. Just remember that red lentils cook faster than toor dal. This dal is put into individual serving bowls and served with rice or Indian flatbreads. A selection of other vegetables and relishes are also included in vegetarian meals. Non-vegetarians might add fish or chicken.