Simon Majumdar's Life-Saving Dahl

4th February 2022, Recipes from Diaspo

In a longer than usual post, Simon Majumdar tells us about growing up in Yorkshire in the 60s & 70s as mixed race, whether you have to be Indian to cook Indian food and shares the recipe behind the dahl that saved his life.

“I was brought up in a generation in Britain where you almost hid some of your Indianness.

Simon Majumdar really got into Bengali food when he was older.

In fact, growing up, he almost didn’t notice Indianness at home. His father moved from Bengal to Rotherham near Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England to qualify as a surgeon. Simon’s father “fell out with his country” in many ways. It might have been, he recalls, for marrying outside his high Brahmic caste and not running the family business.

For an industrial town in South Yorkshire in the 50s & 60s, a Bengali surgeon as father and a Welsh nurse as mother was “unusual”.

But the times were strange too. These were days when, no matter what your heritage, you’d have British names for your kids—a Jeremy or a Simon. Apart from some of the “odd” foods every now and then, he was raised British. He nearly became a priest with the Church of England.

Bengali wasn’t taught in the Majumdar household. (Something that Simon regrets. Especially because even the best English translations don’t capture the sublimity of his favourite poet Tagore’s work). There weren’t the usual celebrations of Indian festivals in his family. No visits to India. Simon’s first visit was his father’s last—when his grandfather died. His smell of Indian food at home was the smell of curry powder—which is more British than Indian.

“I think I was brought up in a very “white is right” background. Being Indian, in that era, was considered a detriment. Something that’d pull you back.

~

The family faced a lot of racism. And Simon did too.

Some of the Yorkshire boys resented the wealthy Bengali surgeon’s son who drove around the working-class steel-and-mine town in his new Jaguar.

At school, all the four Indian children who attended the school were huddled together in one corner. And “no one could be viler than kids—especially the Yorkshire kids in the 1970s.”

Even if his father had an estranged relationship with India, racist encounters brought his cultural pride out. He’d come out of his house to announce “When this country was all living in caves, our families were living in palaces in India.”

Simon is proud of his family too. It goes back a long way. His great grandfather was a social reformer ahead of time—campaigning for widow remarriage and eradication of Sati in colonial India. His grandfather fought for India’s independence from the British.

Yet, Simon doesn’t fully belong. Too Indian to be British and too British to be Indian. His grateful life in Los Angeles is sometimes interrupted by a question: “where would I have them spread my ashes?”

Every now and then, when he puts up an Indian recipe on his feed, there’s some backlash. “Well, you’re not Indian”

“They'll probably put it on my gravestone: neither here nor there.”

~

This brings us to an important question: How much Indianness is needed before one love and share the food? How much DNA?

When Simon made the dahl for his dad, he’d “devour bowls of them”.

Simon learnt Bengali cooking primarily from his Welsh mother. She, in turn, learnt it during her days in a family compound in Ironside road in Calcutta in India. He also learnt some of it from his Filipino aunt. They both cooked amazing Bengali food.

This, he says, shows that it’s to do with training. With talent. (After all, many Indians aren’t such great cooks of Indian food.)

Simon wasn’t trained in Indian cooking through the classic standing-next-to-my-grandmother situation. In fact, relatives held on to their secrets. They’d rather cook it for you as an act of love than reveal it to you. When he asked his aunt how much she put in of a certain ingredient, she’d say "Ek tu" ("a little" in Bengali). But little for the little palm of a four-foot-eleven who’s standing on a box to cook because she’s too small isn’t the same as for someone who’s got “big fat banana fingers”

So he researched and developed dishes in his own hands.

But that doesn’t mean “cuisines are toys for you to throw up and down and mess around with.” What’s needed, Simon says, is due diligence towards the journey the dish has been. A dance with the context of how a dish came into being and not I-am-going-to-throw-in-some-curry-powder-into-this.

Take Simon’s life-saving dahl, for instance. When Simon shares this dahl, he’s representing his culture. He is telling the story of how his family took the standard red lentil dahl and put chopped-up lemons into it.

For Simon, authenticity is personal. It is sometimes about getting close to how his mum cooked it. Before our chat, Simon was thinking about how his mom cooked with mustard oil, and if he could do the same (Even though, it still says on the bottle in West that it t suitable for human consumption)

~

Now, the elephant in the room. Life-saving dahl?

Lifesaving dahl or LSD (an abbreviation that, Simon concedes, is a little worrying) really was a dish that saved his life.

Simon’s mother had just died of leukaemia. He worked at a publishing company then, and the company was failing miserably. The 50 people working there were going to lose their jobs.

Needless to say, it was very stressful. So much that Simon was ready to jump off the apartment in London he lived in. While he was getting ready, he caught a fragrance of food coming out of whatever the Lebanese family in the apartment below were cooking.

At that moment, in Simon’s words, he was “more hungry than suicidal”.

So he went back to the kitchen to make the dahl.

And while he stirred the lentils, (if you want to make LSD, remember to stand around and storm them over low heat, until they’re really hot), he found an old notebook where he’d listed things goals he’d achieve before he reached 40. This included:

• Run a marathon.

• Get a made to measure suit. (Was one of those grownup things to back then.)

• Get teeth straightened (because he says, he had very British teeth that looked like an abandoned cemetery)

• Go everywhere, eat everything.

And that last goal became Simon’s mantra. After he gulped the dahl (with some rice), he went straight to the woman who owned the publishing company, and quit. “It’s better for both of us”, he said.

~

A few weeks later, he was on Bondi Beach, at the beginning of a culinary journey that eventually became his first book, "Eat My Globe"—with a great quote from Anthony Bourdain.

“I always say with Bourdain, we were friendly, but not friends. If that makes sense. But he gave me a quote and I put it on the book and I put it on the proposal and I ended up selling a book. So then, bizarrely enough, I began going from publishing to being an author."

Simon says that our judgements of authenticity sometimes imply ossification. Indian cuisine is anything but ossified. Across the country’s length and breadth, young and old chefs create different food all the time. From when Alexander the Great went to India and came back with rice, to now; it's not a cuisine that stands still.

Simon too isn’t standing still by any measure. He continues to inherit hyphens; he’s now an Anglo-Indian-American bringing the best of his cultural inheritances to his audiences through books, podcasts, TV shows and whatnot.

In London, during his stint at a publishing house, his mixed-race got him the occasional “could you tell me how to make a curry?”. His response usually was “Oh I could. And I could do more than tell you how to make a curry.”

~

Simon’s Recommendations

Simon suggests these, for a deep dive into his culture:

1. The poem Unending Love by Rabindranath Tagore

Simon has recommended this to people who’ve used it as a love song in their wedding. At its heart, it’s a poem of man to God, but to Simon, it’s an incredible expression of love in general—man to God, man to a woman or man to man.

2. Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy

Pather Pancholi, Simon says, is one of the greatest movies ever made.

Simon sometimes sits lost amidst Welsh relatives talking to each other in Welsh (He does know, however, how to pronounce the longest name in the world) and amidst Bengali relatives talking to each other in Bengali. Yet, between two universes, in the middle, he interprets his unique heritage through the grammar of food.

We choose our tool to connect with cultures. Some choose a language. Simon chose food.

~

The Recipe (30 mins, serves 6)

LSD is Simon’s “Bengali chicken soup”—nourishing and homey. He has been making it for “a gazillion years”.

Ingredients

• 1 ½ cup of red lentils (toasted first in a dry pan. I use my fingers to stir and when it is too hot to touch, it is done)

• 1 unwaxed lemon, washed and chopped into 1/8ths

• ½ large onion diced

• 3 cloves garlic (Minced)

• 1-inch fresh ginger (Minced)

• 4 cardamom pods

• 3 cloves

• 1 cinnamon stick

• 2 fresh Serrano chillies (de-seeded and finely minced)

• 1 tsp each of ground turmeric/ginger/cumin/coriander/red chilli powder

• 1 tsp salt

• 1 tsp sugar

• 3 cups vegetable stock or water

• 1 bag of spinach (washed)

• 2 hard boil eggs

• 3 tbsp vegetable or canola oil

Instructions

1. Make a puree of ginger and garlic.

2. Dry toast the lentils over low heat until they begin to take on a nutty aroma.

3. Remove the lentils from the pan and set them aside.

4. Put the oil into a pan over medium heat.

5. Add the cardamom, cloves and cinnamon stick. Cook for 1 minute on low heat until they release their flavour.

6. Add the onion, sprinkle with salt, and cook until it begins to soften.

7. Add the chilli. Cook for 2 minutes.

8. Add the ginger/garlic paste. Cook for 2 minutes.

9. Add the ground spices and sugar. Mix well and cook for 2-3 minutes until the spices lose their rawness. If the mixture begins to stick add a little water.

10. Return the toasted lentils to the pan and mix well so all the pulses are covered with the mixture.

11. Add the stock/water and the lemons. Simmer for around 20 minutes until the lentils have broken down. Add more water if it sticks. Some lentils may take a little longer.

12. Whisk the lentils gently to create more of a soupy texture.

13. Add the spinach, cover and allow to wilt.

14. The end result is quite a watery Dahl which is great served over a hard-boiled egg, or with steamed rice and yoghurt. Show us how it comes out @joindiaspo

Post-script pro-tip from Simon’s aunt’s mother: Before you use them, dry toast the red lentils in the pan on low heat. Stir until the smell comes up. That brings out the nuttiness. Simon isn’t sure if there’s any science to this, but they also seem to take on more flavour that way.