What spices go with lentils

Greek fakes is close to a demonstration dish for bay: lentils, olive oil, onion, vinegar and bay, with almost nothing else to hide behind. Pulses cook long and taste flat without an aromatic, and bay is the one that adds length without adding a flavour of its own.

Add alongside: Onion, Garlic, Black pepper

Fenugreek and pulses recur from Ethiopian misir wot to South Indian sambar. Lentils are mild and slightly sweet, and fenugreek’s bitterness is the counterweight that keeps a long-cooked pulse dish from tasting flat — a role no other spice in the cabinet fills as directly.

How: Whole seed bloomed in fat at the start, a few seeds only

Add alongside: Turmeric, Cumin, Onion

• A few seeds, not a spoonful. Fenugreek is bitter enough to take over a pot of lentils, and burnt fenugreek cannot be rescued.

The tarka poured over dal is one of the most widespread cooking techniques in the world, and cumin is its most common component. Lentils are earthy and slightly flat on their own, and bloomed cumin gives them aroma they cannot generate themselves.

How: Bloomed in ghee with garlic and poured over cooked dal

Add alongside: Turmeric, Garlic, Cayenne pepper

Sambar is the definitive case and it is structural rather than decorative: without tamarind the dish is a lentil stew. Cooked lentils are soft, starchy and slightly flat, and tamarind supplies an acidity that lifts them and a fruit body that keeps the acidity from reading as sharpness. It goes in early, because tamarind is one of the very few flavourings that gains from a long simmer.

How: Strained tamarind water added to sambar with the vegetables; In rasam, where it is the dominant flavour alongside pepper

Add alongside: Mustard seed, Fenugreek, Turmeric

• Dose by taste rather than by spoon: block, paste and concentrate differ several-fold and no label distinguishes them.

The pairing asafoetida exists for in practice. It goes into the tempering that starts or finishes nearly every dal, contributing a savoury allium depth to a dish that often contains no onion or garlic at all, and the tradition attaches a digestive reason to the combination that SpiceHQ records as tradition rather than as a claim.

How: A pinch into hot oil at the start of a tadka; With mustard seed and cumin in a finishing tempering

Add alongside: Mustard seed, Cumin, Turmeric

• It goes into the fat near the end of the tempering — it needs the least time of anything in the pan and burns to acridity in seconds.

Lentils are earthy and almost sweet and have very little aromatic character of their own, so they take a savoury base readily. Fried onion is the standard one from France to Bengal — in a dal it is often the finishing tarka as well as the base, and browned onion over rice and lentils is a dish in itself in Egypt and the Levant.

How: Browned and stirred through cooked lentils as a finish; Crisp-fried as a garnish over rice and lentils

Add alongside: Cumin, Asafoetida, Turmeric

Structural in South Indian cooking rather than optional. Lentils are earthy and mild and need aromatics carried in fat to lift them, which is exactly what a tempering does: the leaves crisp in hot oil, their aroma moves into the fat, and the fat is poured over the dal. Sambar, rasam and every everyday dal in Tamil Nadu and Kerala are built this way.

How: Fried in oil with mustard seed and asafoetida and poured over cooked dal; In the initial tempering for sambar and rasam

Add alongside: Mustard seed, Asafoetida, Turmeric

• The leaves must go into hot fat, not into the simmering pot. Boiled, they give up a fraction of what they hold.

Whole seeds bloomed in fat and poured over cooked lentils — the tempering that finishes dal across South Asia. Nigella works particularly well in that role because it survives the pour intact, so a soft dish gains texture as well as aroma.

How: In a tempering poured over dal at the end

Add alongside: Cumin, Mustard seed, Fenugreek

Lentils and beans are soft, starchy and flat without an acid, and dried lime is the one Persian and Gulf cooking reaches for. It goes in whole at the start and gives up its sourness gradually over exactly the cooking time pulses need.

How: Whole in a lentil and herb khoresh; In a bean soup with turmeric

Add alongside: Turmeric, Cumin, Parsley

Ethiopian misir wot and Indian dal both start the same way: onion, garlic and a great deal of ginger cooked down before the pulses go in. Ginger’s sharpness cuts the heaviness of a long-cooked lentil dish in a way that a purely aromatic spice does not.

Add alongside: Fenugreek, Turmeric, Garlic

The Levantine treatment, and a corrective to thinking of allspice as a pudding spice. In mujaddara and stuffed vegetables it sits with cumin and cinnamon as a savoury warm note, which is how most of the world outside Britain uses it.

Add alongside: Cumin, Cinnamon (Ceylon), Onion

Pulses are mild and slightly sweet and take smoke unusually well — it supplies the depth that meat would otherwise provide, which is why chipotle is the most useful single spice in a vegetarian chilli or a pot of beans.

Add alongside: Cumin, Onion, Coriander seed

Dal makhani and the heavier North Indian lentil dishes, where a long slow cook and a good deal of butter or cream give the smoke both time and fat to travel through. In a quick dal it would be wasted.

How: Bruised into the tempering for a slow-cooked dal; Whole in the pot with the pulses

Add alongside: Cumin, Cassia, Garlic

Dals across Maharashtra and coastal Karnataka use kokum where a southern dal would use tamarind, and the difference is legible in the bowl: kokum gives a cleaner, lighter sourness and leaves the dal its colour rather than browning it. Lentils are also long-cooked, which suits an ingredient that gives up its acid slowly.

How: In Maharashtrian and Konkan dals; Added part-way through the simmer

Add alongside: Turmeric, Asafoetida, Mustard seed