A Desperate Dhal
Pravasan Pillay
It was a bitterly freezing winter's day in 2011, five months after I had moved to Sweden from South Africa. I was in the small kitchen of our apartment, standing at the stove, and heating a portion of canned ärtsoppa – split pea soup. The soup, made with yellow split peas, diced ham, thyme, and marjoram, is a popular dish in Sweden. It's traditionally eaten on Thursdays, and is served with mustard as an accompaniment. It's also often followed by pancakes and jam.
Even though ärtsoppa was reserved for Thursdays, I found myself eating it at least four to five times a week for lunch – after I had discovered it by accident in the supermarket. I found the dish hearty with a deep, satisfying savouriness. However, I wasn't a fan of the mustard I was supposed to eat it with. After warming the ärtsoppa, I would, instead, squirt a few drops of chilli sauce – usually peri peri, which I had brought with me from South Africa – into my bowl, giving the mushy, yellow soup a fiery hue and taste.
I had only been living in Sweden a short while, but I knew that what I was doing was wrong, that I was desecrating a classic Swedish dish. In my defence, I only did so when I was alone. I would never think to commit this culinary murder in front of a Swede. But, culinary murder or not, the combination of the chilli sauce and the ärtsoppa worked for me. It turned the soup into something more familiar to my immigrant taste buds.
However, it wasn't until that cold February morning, staring into the bubbling pot, that it clicked in my head and I saw that what I was unconsciously trying to do by adding the sauce to ärtsoppa was to turn it into dhal – a spiced soup-like Indian lentil dish that I grew up eating. Having made the connection between ärtsoppa and dhal – both are strikingly similar to each other in colour, consistency and earthiness – I realised with dawning excitement that what this ärtsoppa needed was not peri-peri but masala.
I was hesitant though. It was one thing to shake a couple of cheeky drops of chilli sauce into ärtsoppa but adding masala and other spices was surely taking it too far. But, now that the cumin seed had been planted in my mind, it began to grow. In the end, I could no longer fight it – I had to make ärtsoppa dhal.
I looked nervously over my shoulder as I pulled down my spice box from the cupboard. It may have been my imagination but it seemed as though the sky darkened as I opened the box. I began frying a hastily chopped onion, mustard seeds, a bay leaf, dried red chillies, cassia bark, and masala in oil. I was making a traditional spiced finishing oil, or tadka, to combine into the ärtsoppa – as one does with a dhal. I soon held the pan over the pot and watched the boiling masala oil hit the surface of the soup. It spluttered, sizzled and hissed. Thus was born a desperate dhal.
I then warmed cold rice in the microwave, and dished generous spoonfuls of my makeshift dhal onto it, along with chillies pickle. I sat down at the kitchen table with my meal. I opened that morning's copy of Dagens Nyheter, the newspaper my wife subscribed to, and flipped through it as I ate. I didn't understand Swedish yet, so I just looked at the pictures. The dhal didn't taste particularly good but I finished my plate.
