memes

I love alliums as much as the next food-obsessed nb person, but I want to share a story of a time a friend blew my mind and opened it to infinite possibilities:

One time I went to an Indian's friend's house for dinner, and we were all having a good time, enjoying a dal he had made with fresh spices he'd brought from back home, so you knew it was the good stuff, on top of him being a professional cook. A friend of mine, who is 2nd generation Indian-American kind of nudges me in the shoulder and whispers: "doesn't this dal taste wrong to you?", and i'm like "what do you mean, it's delicious!", she says "oh yeah it's very tasty, don't get me wrong. It just tastes wrong to me, and i've been eating dal all my life, even in India". We leave it at that that evening, and everyone goes home.

Later, I ask my friend to show me how he makes it, so I return to his to house to learn to make tasty dal, and I bring my friend along. We're all chatting in the kitchen, when suddenly she goes silent. We ask her what's wrong, and she says, with a tone halfway between surprise and offense: "you put onions in your dal!?". Dead silence from both of us, incredulous at what she just said, because i really couldn't imagine making food without onions or some kind of allium (i'm from the Global South, but not in a place where we have a lot of Indian people, so i had no idea what goes in Indian food). My friend explains that of course, everything always has onions and garlic, that's the way you make dal. Long story short, my friends keep this friendly argument about alliums in Indian food for what feels like forever, and the verdict is that my friend will make an onionless dal for us to taste and compare.

Couple weeks pass, we go to her house and she makes us her version of dal, and it's completely different, on account of having no onions or garlic (duh). But, in my opinion, it's easily one of the tastiest things i've ever had (and i've been lucky to have eaten really delicious food before, I'm friends with many professional cooks and everyone i know is working with food somehow); even my Indian friend, who was skeptical at making an Indian dish without alliums, is shocked at how tasty it is. We keep talking after dinner, trying to figure out why two dishes that are nominally the same thing and from the same region, are so radically different. Turns out my friend had only eaten her grandmother's dal recipe, which she made for her when she went to visit her in India, her parents made it too growing up, and later she learned to make it herself; she'd never had onion-y dal before. And the reason her dal doesn't have any alliums is because her grandmother is a devout Jain, and they don't eat alliums out of religious observance. After that, I asked my friend to teach me everything she knows about making tasty things without onions or garlic, and my flavor vocabulary was forever changed. I still put onions and garlic on literally everything, but every now and then I use her tricks and the food turns so good, you have no idea.

TL;DR: try Jain recipes. No onions or garlic, but they're so good!