Dal Is the Ultimate Comfort Food

One of my favorite Hindi terms is “ghar ka khaana.” It literally means “home food,” but it also encompasses the singular joy and unfussiness of meals made in your own kitchen — the dishes that remind you of childhood, the ones you won’t often find in restaurants.

My quintessential ghar ka khaana? Dal.

To make dal feels like an alchemical feat, watching the pebbly lentils turn creamy, starchy and golden with turmeric. I love the sizzle of the hot, spiced ghee when it is poured into the lentils, the way that dal envelops a bowl of rice like a hug. The first time I published my mother’s recipes for dal in my cookbook, “Indian-ish,” it felt as if I was letting people in on a secret — a solution to their weeknight dinner woes, courtesy of my ancestors.

Across South Asia and its diaspora, dal — which refers to both the legumes and the finished dish — is inherently linked to comfort, whether simmered with coconut milk, sweetened with a little jaggery or topped with crisp curry leaves.

In interviews, many people said it was the first food they fed to their children. The meal they missed most when they went off to college. The dish they break Ramadan fasts with. The first thing they learned to cook from their mother, who insisted on providing preparation times in whistles of a pressure cooker rather than minutes.

“Almost all of us have positive associations with dal because we grew up being fed dal,” said Sarah Thankam Matthews, an Indian American novelist living in Brooklyn. “Part of it is the emotional association of being fed something, and then there is the essential nature of what it is as a dish: warm, goopy and nourishing.”

Aisha Saeed, the Pakistani American author of the children’s book “Bilal Cooks Daal,” said that during her college days, dal was “my version of ramen” — cheap, filling and hard to mess up.

Ms. Saeed, who lives in Atlanta, didn’t realize just how widely beloved dal was until she published her book in 2019 and received hundreds of notes from students and parents who were overjoyed to see their childhood dish memorialized in literature.

The recipe for dal is endlessly flexible. Mo Sherifdeen, a travel marketer in Portland, Ore., who is Sri Lankan American, has added ketchup to his to temper the spiciness. I’ve added sliced garlic to mine, or let the lentils thicken to the texture of refried beans and stuffed them in a tortilla. But it’s my mother’s simplest, 15-minute version — which requires just masoor dal (red lentils), turmeric, ghee, cumin seeds, asafetida and chile powder — that I find the most satisfying.

The method may vary, but the emotions it evokes are the same.

“When I am sad or when I am crying or when I am upset, I will have a bowl of dal and rice,” said Nithya Ruff, an Indian American technology executive in Raleigh, N.C. “You can train the palate at childhood, and that is what you associate with comfort. Anything you pick up after you grow up — it never takes that same status.”

Throughout my childhood, our family traveled often because of my mother’s job in the airline business. No matter where we were — and no matter how much we loved the food there — my father would eventually crave dal. Toward the end of the vacation, he’d retrieve the packets of instant dal in his suitcase, boil water in our hotel room and make himself a bowl.

I used to make fun of him. But now I’ve adopted a similar ritual for each time I return from a trip. Before I even unpack, I simmer lentils and make rice. And as I take my first bite, the thought is always the same: Was there ever anything as delicious as dal?