It's been nine days, and I'm getting better at reminding myself that a cumulative total of zero people are keeping a count of how many days it's been since I've posted to this blog. As I alluded to in my last post, lockdown has been feeling pretty tough for me recently and the last thing anyone in such a position (of which, I'm sure there are many) should be doing is pushing their interests into the realm of drudgery. I'm not going to go into what I've been finding difficult specifically, as it is stuff that I imagine almost everyone is going through at the moment; further illustration is neither necessary nor interesting.
What have I been doing since you last heard from me? Well, I've been in the kitchen a fair bit. Thankfully my phase of cooking ennui seems to have passed, and I've mostly been doing a lot of cooking for pleasure/nourishment, as opposed to doing so for recipe development. Actually, I'm writing here about a dish which didn't originally spring from a recipe but one which I cooked, ate and immediately realised that I'd have to retroactively piece together ingredient quantities and instructions, and recreate it. I've also been fine-tuning my way many trials of a somewhat experimental recipe creation process. It might work out and you might hear about it here, or it might not quite hit the mark; I'll be okay with either (but I'm secretly keeping my fingers crossed the former!)
Enough about me, I'm going to take this occasion to do something uncharacteristic and reluctantly wade into drama. If anyone here keeps up with Alison Roman or her until-recent New York Times column, you'll probably know about the the sort-of row that has ensued over the past few weeks; I call it a "sort-of row" due to the fact that the most vociferous opinions have come from those not directly involved within it. For the TL;DR version, in an interview in The New Consumer, Roman took a critical aim at both Chrissy Teigen and Marie Kondo for what she perceives as the over-capitalisation of their brand image through their extensive product lines. This was interpreted by many as an attempt to censure two women of Asian descent simply for having careers.
While I think, at the very least, this is a worthwhile conversation to be having, this isn't the part of the story I particularly want to focus on. Focusing on "throwing shade" or dragging someone can only give a very surface-level appraisal of the situation, and besides, it's not as if Roman herself hasn't acknowledged how her own white privilege shaped her remarks. Beyond the incident itself, a conversation has arisen about the erasure of the ethnic origins of certain dishes and ingredients by white food writers. While much of this has crystallised around Roman herself and a supposed curry referred to as a "stew", she is far from the sole perpetrator. On the contrary, this is virtually endemic among food writers.
I find myself wondering about this given my proximity to the issue. I'm a white food writer who very often uses ingredients of cultural origin that isn't my own, therefore part of the demographic that should be paying attention to this conversation. I come to you with a recipe for a green lentil stew flavoured with ingredients common in Iranian cooking such as sumac and citrus; indeed, some might debate that it is a form of adasi, a Persian lentil stew, yet it does diverge from this blueprint quite considerably. Beyond acknowledging the Iranian origins of the food (or, where is the line between what we refer to as Iranian and Persian food?) should it then be tenuously linked to an already existing dish? This may seem like a heavy handed case of geo-semanticism, but the issue of white writers taking credit for innovation where it isn't due has been oft-repeated over the past 500 or so years.
I think there's an issue here with simplistic white-liberal cosmopolitanism. Taking a "no borders" approach to cooking sounds fantastic on the surface, but it has the convenient tendency of steamrolling over years of colonial-cultural acquisition. It means that anyone could essentially take a recipe for chana masala, refer to it as a "spiced chickpea soup" and go viral for it, as Roman's "stew"/"curry" did. As referenced by this tweet, the white writer then becomes the non-threatening "Trojan horse" for certain foods and ingredients that have been previously seen as too ethnic when presented by writers of colour. While I'm certainly not going viral by any stretch of the imagination, my recipes for two-pepper tofu, sweet & smoky pulled jackfruit and sriracha roasted cauliflower could be considered to be somewhat divorced from the cultural origins of their ingredients.
I think whenever a conversation like this arises, there are always voices that spring up to proclaim that we should just let food be food; kind of like the oft-repeated dinner table admonition of "why can't we just talk about something nice" (my mother is a nurse, so I used to hear this one a lot from my father). Having the ability to opt out of these conversations is one that comes with great privilege, and this is just one reason why I believe that the very least we can do is to not shut them down when they do occur. A meal on a plate is more than "just food" in the same way that a novel is so much more than it's constituent letters; it's embedded with history, a past that can speak of collective celebrations and trauma in the same breath. We'd do well to respect that.
Iranian Sumac & Lemon Lentil Stew
with Sweet Potato, and Dill & Cumin-Scented Yoghurt
Preparation time: 25 minutes
Cooking time: 45 minutes
Serves: 3-4
Ingredients
Lentil Stew
1 medium red onion, finely diced
1 medium carrot, coarsely grated
1 stalk of celery, finely diced
4 cloves of garlic, finely minced or crushed into a paste
1 tbsp of flat leaf parsley, finely chopped or crushed into a paste
1 tbsp olive oil
35ml of freshly squeezed lemon juice
250g of dried green lentils
600 ml of vegetable stock
350-400g of sweet potato, chopped into 2cm cubes
3 tsp of sumac
1/2 tsp of cumin
3/4 tbsp of white wine vinegar
Seeds from 2 cardamom pods, ground
1/4 tsp of black peppercorns, ground
1/2 tsp of dark soy sauce
1/2 tsp of salt
Topping
95g Greek yoghurt
1 tbsp fresh dill, coarsely chopped + extra for sprinkling
1/2 tsp of cumin
15ml freshly squeeze lemon juice
Red pepper flakes for sprinkling
1 slice of lemon for each person
Method
Bring a large saucepan of salted water to the boil. Make sure to taste the water; it should be about as salty as brine. Add the sweet potato and cook on a rolling boil for 4 minutes, draining and setting aside afterwards.
Heat 1 tsp of olive oil in a large saucepan or wok over a medium-low, before adding in the red onion, carrot and celery. Cook over a medium low heat for 10 minutes. During this time, the vegetables should soften and sweeten. Stir in the crushed garlic and parsley, sumac, cumin, black pepper, salt and cardamom and cook over a medium-low heat for a further 1 minute.
Pour over the vegetable stock, white wine vinegar and soy sauce, stir the mixture through and turn the pan up to a high heat. Wait until the mixture has come to boil, and turn down to a medium heat. Simmer for 25 minutes, or until the lentils have absorbed all but a small amount of the liquid. Make sure to taste the mixture while it is cooking, and adjust if needed. Stir the mixture through every few minutes to ensure that the liquid is evenly distributed among the lentils
While the lentils are cooking, prepare the topping. Add the yoghurt into a bowl with the cumin, lemon juice and dill and mix until combined.
After the lentils have been cooking for 25 minutes, stir the lemon juice through the mixture and take off of the heat. Distribute into bowls, spooning over yoghurt and sprinkling the dill and red pepper flakes into each bowl. Add one lemon segment into each bowl to squeeze extra citrus into the mix.
This can be served with rice, cous-cous or just as it is.
Notes & Adjustments
A note on the eating: bring the yoghurt, dill and red pepper flakes to the table/sofa/floor with you. That way, you can re-apply as you go if needed.
If you can find some nearby to you, feel free to substitute the Greek yoghurt for labneh. You may need to adjust the amount of lemon juice used if so, but trust your tastebuds with this!
If you have brown or puy lentils in your store-cupboard then feel free to use them in the place of the green, however I would not recommend using red lentils.
I tend to crush my garlic and herbs together in a pestle and mortar, but finely chopped works too!
You can make this vegan by using a vegan yoghurt.
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