Dishoom origins

Culture, Media, General
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It’s a nice feature.
But in this day and age, misspelling “Maharati” and “Gujerati” is inexplicable.

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Yes, those weird spellings annoyed me. The Guardian does have form for lack of sub-editor oversight.

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The Guardian’s sub-editing is a decades long standing joke. Satirical magazine, Private Eye, always refers to it as the Grauniad.

It was an interesting read. Father Christmas brought me the Dishoom cookbook (which I havent yet cooked from) which is a nice mix of recipes and tourist story. By the by, we’re going to their Manchester branch this week. I think that it was their first outside London. We’d discounted it because it didnt take reservations in the evening - we’re not spending the best part of an hour to get into the city on the off-chance of getting a table. But recently looked at their website again and, lo & behold, they now take bookings. I’m looking forward to seeing how it compares with our regular Mumbai street food restaurant (Bombay to Mumbai in Bramhall).

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I’ve not read the article yet (but I will) nor have I eaten at any location (but I will) , although I have the book.

I pipe up here to say that I misinterpreted the title as referring to the word “dishoom”, not the restaurant empire. The word suggests a punch, and it was common in my boys school (St. Xavier’s Boys High School, to assign blame where it’s richly deserved), for us sex-starved boys to rate our primary school teachers – we were only allowed young catholic women till 4th “standard”, but that did not prevent us after we got older to cluster in the right spots – in “dishooms”. We had our dishooms, and, occasionally our dishoom-dishooms.

To keep this food-focused, we’d then go and have snacks from the two vendors outside our school gates – patla babu and jada babu (the thin guy and the fat guy).

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House black daal (considerably less than 24 hours, but still lengthy cook), is very much worth the effort, and tastes pretty close to the restaurant version. Also Chicken Ruby amongst others. Not had any duds, fab book.

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I know there’s a big cult following of and some genius marketing behind the ‘24 hour’ black dal. I make an excellent version of black dal myself - apart from the overnight soaking of the dried lentils, a pressure cooker makes short work of cooking the dal. Dishoom might have the financial resources to use their hobs for 24 hours a day but home cooks can easily achieve similar results without busting their budget.

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Absolutely.

May I please add, though, that pressure-cooking dal (also meat, etc.) produces discernibly different results from slow simmering. What one prefers is, of course, up to one.

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Of course. It is possible to completely overcook the lentils to a mush in a pressure cooker - I have suffered this especially with red lentils if I get distracted and they stay in the cooker too long. My personal tactic is to pressure cook the soaked lentils until they are mostly cooked but holding their shape. Then transfer to a pan to cook further with the spicing/tarka etc the recipe calls for, stirring with a wooden spoon until the desired consistency is reached. If it’s being made for guests, then finishing off with some cream makes it just a bit more rich.