Doesn’t it hurt when foreigners colonise Asian dishes and call them using fancy names? Remember when a Malaysian restaurant called our papads ‘Asian Nachos’ on its food menu? And sometimes they fail to do a basic Google search about the origin of a dish. Yeah, we are talking about an article of the New York Times in which the newspaper called Chicken Manchurian a ‘Pakistani-Chinese dish’. Now, imagine if someone misrepresents dal, the staple dish in desi households, with a fancy title. Yep, that has happened.
NYT called dal a ‘red lentil soup’ in one of its articles on Twitter. The post has gone viral for obvious reason.
The article posted by The New York Times (@nytimes) shows a picture of dal fry in a bowl which the newspaper refer to as ‘lentil soup’. The dish is garnished with coriander leaves.
“The revelatory lentil soup takes less than an hour to make…” the tweet reads.
Check it out here:
“This is a lentil soup that defies expectations of what lentil soup can be. Based on a Turkish lentil soup, mercimek corbasi, it is light, spicy and a bold red color (no murky brown here): a revelatory dish that takes less than an hour to make,” reads an excerpt from its description on the NYT website.
In the article, the total time to prepare this dish is mentioned as 45 minutes.
Desi netizens are going crazy over calling dal a ‘lentil soup’.
Some of them were surprised with the fact that the article calls dal a ‘revelatory’ dish. Let’s see the reactions:
So, dal, chawal and roti become lentil soup, rice, and flat bread in the West. Right? Not at all pleasing.