Dal, yogurt rice and the intimacy of cooking “home foods”

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By Fareeha Molvi

(This piece was originally published to Instagram on September 1, 2020)

In the past months, South Asian dishes like dal, kichdi and yogurt rice have made their way into the quarantine spotlight. Tan France is serving dal with roti on IGTV. Padma Lakshmi is using her hands to mix up South Indian yogurt rice on Stories. Prestige food media like NYT Food is featuring a kichdi recipe and Food & Wine has an excellent essay on yogurt rice as comfort food. 

“These are the dishes that seasoned your palate as a child and informed your culinary preferences as an adult. The ones you’ve eaten countless times before but never once seen on a buzzy menu at an ethnic-chic restaurant. “

Fareeha Molvi

Though I’ve eaten these simple “home foods” many times before, I am fascinated by the unexpected interest in them. Home foods are the ones you grew up with: nutritious, economical and scalable with a few humble ingredients. These are the dishes that seasoned your palate as a child and informed your culinary preferences as an adult. The ones you crave when you’re tired, sick or in need of comfort. The ones you’ve eaten countless times before but never once seen on a buzzy menu at an ethnic-chic restaurant. 

They’re not the ones you beg your mom to make when you have a school friend over. They’re not the ones you usually post about on social media because you’re afraid of someone telling you it looks like vomit. 

In quarantine, much of our normal pretenses have fallen away. We’re all a bit more casual and ironically more intimate despite the physical distance. Before, perhaps, there was some obligation to offer you the most assimilated, polished version of ourselves. The “butter chicken” version: Agreeable, if not highly-anglicized, and well-suited to “mainstream” tastebuds. But now that the world as we know it is changing in ways we still don’t fully grasp – does it make sense anymore to not share our whole selves, full chili-laden tadka and all?