Pappurumindi, or a dal chutney

Next to rice–is dal.

Next to rice meaning alongside on a plate, also second in civilizational and culinary importance, but then inseparable really. The humble dal-chawal, paruppu-saadam, pappu-annam is what almost every Indian born and bred on the subcontinent’s foods will crave when kept away from those foods for long enough. Dal and rice make a wholesome meal, and they are the organizing elements of most all home meals–all anyone could ever need, nutritionally and emotionally. The need for such food is essential, almost primal, truer than a passport in telling what part of the world you’re really from. Like that old Birbal story of identifying the expert linguist’s mother tongue: in what language does he curse when he who is fluent in all languages is surprised in sleep by a splash of cold water? Like that, if you crave dal at the moments of deepest hunger, there’s Indian at the core of you.

It is also the classic embodiment of simplicity and minimalism in Indian cookery. There is nothing easier than dal to cook in a pinch, we truly believe, and — although dal (like rice, next to rice) is used to make an absolutely bewildering array of dishes, savory to sweet, snack-stock-soup-side-sambar to 1-pot khichdis, fresh and whole to dried and split, all across the subcontinent — the quintessential comfort food is the quickest and most minimalist of spiced seasoned dals, cooked and served in 15 minutes flat, with almost no effort.

Even in this category are a bewildering array of simple dal recipes [and I’m talking only of pulses, not even about dried beans as Pratiba Karan does in her Book of Dals, which came out earlier this year], each one different because of subtle tempering and cooking variations, each one made with pretty much whatever ingredients are on hand. Homes in the tribal belt of Gujarat, as I discovered on my travels there with Sheetal, invariably have a grinding stone on which are assembled a few chillies, garlic, fresh coriander, tender coriander seeds, fresh turmeric root in season, perhaps ginger, perhaps red chillies, perhaps lime–really, whatever adds zing and zest. These ingredients make a pounded chutney in and of themselves, or they may be used to flavor whatever dal is cooking that day.

Pappu urumindi is a local take on this pan-Indian theme, except that it relies on dry pantry staples and nothing fresh. It needs no vegetables at all, only a small handful of spices [dhania, jeera, menthulu/methi, lots of red chillies, dry coconut], other dals that are used themselves as flavor enhancers [chana, urad] and tamarind to sour. These are all usually well-stocked in most Indian kitchens, even very humble ones, making the pappu urumindi the quick product of a pantry that’s down to its bare essentials, the answer to hunger and tiredness and the solution for the ends of long work days that leave room for little else.

Don’t let the companies marketing quick-fix packets of instant this-or-that fool you into believing that Indian home food is too complex to prepare quickly. Don’t even define “minimalism” by the number of ingredients used, rather by the hugely flexible approach to cookery that can make something out of everything or near-nothing without so much as flinching once. Abundance isn’t physical quantum, it’s what you make of whatever there is.

We have plenty of home-grown solutions for all those impoverished moments we’ve all faced, tired, distracted, depleted. We just need to remember what those solutions are and seek out the native ingenuities of cooks who have lived with Mother Hubbard’s cupboards and created simple magic out of self-reliance for far longer than any savvy merchant peddling prettily packaged products–and all their associated dependencies.

Pappu urumindi is a dal with a difference: a dal chutney, if you like, owing I believe to its thickened semi-solid texture and red chilli-rich spiciness. Had it been made of raw toor dal (just roasted and ground), it would have been a straightforward kandi-pachadi, literally a raw toor dal chutney. But pappurumindi is made from cooked dal, so it’s classified in much the same way Tamilians do the thuvaiyal. Pappu [dal] + ooru [literally, to soak; alluding to pickling and/or cooking] + pindi [powder or powdered, alluding to dals/spices that have been powdered]= urumindi or urubindi.

Urumindi is itself a chutney by any other name in many parts of Andhra. I encountered it first in the form of the chinturubindi or tamarind chutney of my mother-in-law’s ancestral village near Bagepalli a few hours north of Bangalore, and heard of mango/maamidikaya urumindi and other cooked vegetable additions since (all of which makes it all the more identical to the Tamil thuvaiyal).