Dal is to India what pasta is to Italy. Cheap to produce, highly nutritional, suitable for long storage and capable of being cooked in a basic pot on an open fire, dal has been providing nourishment to millions of Indians for millennia. It truly is a pan-Indian dish consumed by rich and poor alike.

Cheap to produce, highly nutritional, and suitable for long storage periods, Dal is a genuinely impressive dish of infinite variety. Here, Krishna Dutta has assembled all the available recipes she could find from her native India to provide readers with a comprehensive collection of Dal dishes, alongside text which provides a fascinating historical and cultural context for the recipes.