How to Make a Lentil Soup

How to Make Easy Tea. First, fill a pot with water. Then put the pot on the stove. Now wait for the water to be hot. Add one tea bag to your cup. Pour the hot water into the cup. Wait two minutes. Drink your tea.

How to Make a Quick Bean Stew. First, get one tin of white beans. Then chop one onion and one tomato into small pieces. Heat some oil in a pot and cook the onion for five minutes. After that, add the tomato and cook for two more minutes. Now add the beans with their water and a little salt. Cook everything for ten minutes, because the beans need to get soft and warm. The stew is simple but it is filling, and it is good with rice or bread.

If you only learn one rice-and-beans, make this one. It costs almost nothing, it keeps for days, and it will save you on the weeks when you have run out of money before you have run out of month. You will need: a cup of long-grain rice, a tin of black beans (drained, but keep a little of the liquid), a small onion, two cloves of garlic, a spoon of oil, half a teaspoon of cumin, salt, and water. Start by chopping the onion and the garlic finely. Heat the oil in a small pot on a low flame and add the onion. Cook it gently for five minutes, because if you rush it the onion stays raw in the middle. Add the garlic and the cumin and stir for a minute. The cumin will smell warm and a little smoky — this is what you want. Add the beans and a small splash of the bean liquid, and stir them through. Now pour in the rice and one and a half cups of water. Add a pinch of salt. Bring it to a gentle bubble, then put a lid on the pot and turn the heat right down. Cook for twelve minutes without lifting the lid. Then take the pot off the heat — still without lifting the lid — and let it sit for five more minutes. Open it. Fork everything through. Taste. Add more salt if you need it. This is a meal in itself, but it is even better with a fried egg on top, or with a little hot sauce, or with a tomato cut into pieces and a pinch of salt on the side. The next day's portion is always better, so always make more than you need.

There is no honest case for not knowing how to make a fried egg on rice. It costs less than a bus ticket, takes less than ten minutes, and is the meal I would still recognise as mine if I had nothing else in the cupboard. Mention this dish in the wrong company and someone will tell you it is too simple to count, which is precisely the kind of thing said by people who have never had to feed themselves at the end of a long, cheap month. To make a portion for one: cook a cup of rice in the way you usually cook rice. While the rice is cooking, heat a generous spoon of oil in a small pan over medium heat. When the oil shimmers, crack an egg directly into it. The white will spit and bubble at the edges; this is what you want. Tilt the pan slightly and spoon the hot oil over the white near the yolk for thirty seconds, until the white is set but the yolk is still soft. Slide the egg onto the hot rice. Drizzle a teaspoon of soy sauce over the top, or, if you don't have soy sauce, a tiny pinch of salt. Add half a teaspoon of sesame oil if you have it; if not, the dish is still itself. Eat with a spoon. The yolk should break into the rice on the first bite. The dignity of this meal lies in what it does not need: no special pan, no fresh herbs, no list of imported ingredients, no event. It needs the rice you already have, the egg that costs almost nothing, and the spoon you ate breakfast with. There is, I admit, a more refined version. A particular variety of rice, a particular variety of egg, a particular brand of soy sauce, a small shower of finely chopped spring onions. I have, on occasions, attempted these. They are not better in any way that matters when you are tired and standing in your kitchen at half past nine in the evening, looking for the meal that asks the least of you. The version above is the one I learned the hard way — by failing at it for several years, alone, until one evening it tasted right. It feeds me still. I would call it many things; humble is not one of them.

There is a particular dal that my mother used to make on Sunday evenings, and which I now make on Tuesday evenings when I cannot face anything more elaborate. It is the simplest version of a thing that has many more elaborate versions, and in the long argument over which is the 'authentic' dal, this one would not even be allowed in the room. I make no claim for its authenticity. I make a claim only for its usefulness. You will need: a cup of red lentils, a small onion, two cloves of garlic, a small piece of ginger, a teaspoon of ground cumin, a teaspoon of turmeric, a small spoon of butter or ghee at the end, salt, and water. That is everything. The technique is small and forgiving. Wash the lentils until the water runs less cloudy. Chop the onion finely, the garlic and ginger more finely still. Heat a small spoon of oil in a heavy pot. Sweat the onion gently for five minutes — gently is the operative word, and a tired cook can be forgiven for nudging the heat upward, but not by much. Add the garlic and ginger, stir, then the cumin and turmeric. Stir for another thirty seconds, until the spices smell warm rather than dusty. Add the lentils and about three cups of water. Bring it up to a gentle simmer. Lower the heat. Walk away for twenty-five minutes. Stir from time to time. The lentils will fall apart on their own; the dal will thicken; the colour will turn from a sharp yellow to something more golden. At the end, salt to taste, and stir in the small spoon of butter off the heat. Eat with rice, or with bread, or by itself with a spoon when there is no one else to feed. There is, I should say, a great deal that this recipe leaves out. There are versions that use four kinds of dal blended together, that build a complex tarka of mustard seed and curry leaves and dried chilli, that are watched over for an hour by someone who knows what each stage should sound like. Those versions exist; they are wonderful; and on a tired Tuesday they have nothing useful to say to me. The version I have given you is the one I learned not from a recipe but from being in a kitchen on a wet evening, watching someone who could have been doing anything else with that hour. Their hands moved without consultation. They were thinking about something other than the dal. The dal was simply happening. That is the kind of cooking I think most people are actually trying to learn, and that no recipe — including this one — can quite teach. What a recipe like this can do is put you in front of the pot. It can give you the right ingredients in the right order, and a rough time. The rest is what your hands learn over the next twenty pots, and what your nose decides to remember. I know my mother's dal not because she ever wrote it down, but because I made it badly, alone, in a small flat in another country, until one day it tasted right. That, in the end, is the only recipe she ever gave me — the permission to fail at it for as long as it took.

The dish I learned earliest, and have made most often, is a kind of greens-and-rice that does not have a name in the kitchen I learned it in. It was simply what was made when there was nothing else, and what was made when there was something else but everyone was too tired to honour it. I have been making it now for fifteen years, in three countries, in increasingly small kitchens, and each time the dish has the slightly unsettling property of tasting more like itself than the time before. To make a portion for two: take a small bunch of any leafy green you can afford — spinach, chard, kale, the tougher dark-green leaves of any cabbage, the unloved stems and outer leaves you would otherwise throw away. Wash them well; a great deal of grit hides in greens. Chop them roughly, stems and all, the stems separated. Heat a generous spoon of oil in a heavy pan. Add a finely chopped clove of garlic, and, if you have it, a small dried chilli broken in half. Stir for thirty seconds — the garlic should not brown. Add the chopped stems first, with a pinch of salt, and cook for two minutes until they begin to soften. Then add the leaves, in large handfuls, stirring them down as they wilt. They will lose volume dramatically; do not panic. Cook for another three minutes, until the greens are bright and tender. Season with salt and a small squeeze of lemon if you have it, or a splash of vinegar if you do not. Serve over rice — any kind, plain — and eat with a spoon. There is no reason to make this dish elaborate, and many reasons not to. I have come, over the years, to think of it as the meal I make when I would like to feel like myself again. There is a small unwelcome category of writing in which a person describes their grandmother's recipe with a kind of reverent tremble, and the reader is invited to feel that the writer's grandmother was somehow more authentic than other people's grandmothers, who, presumably, did not. I would like to avoid this. The grandmother who taught me this dish was — let us say — not in all respects a kind woman. She had her favourites and I was not among them. The cooking, however, was given without favouritism. The pan she fried garlic in was the same pan she would have fried garlic in for anyone, and the chopping motion she used had a kind of professional unsentimentality that I have only recently come to admire. She was teaching me a technique, not bestowing a gift. I think now this was actually the most generous form the lesson could take. What I would say, against the romantic version of inherited cooking, is that the inheritance is not the love. The love is sometimes there and sometimes isn't, and the cooking is more durable than either. A great many people in this world have been fed reliably by relatives they have complicated feelings about, and their plates were not for that reason less full. The dish I make now is the one I learned then, more or less; my version is slightly different, the way a copy of a copy of a copy is slightly different, and I am suspicious of any account that says my version is wrong. The version I make is the version that lives in my hands. It will go on living there long after both my opinions about it and the original cook are gone. There is, I think, a particular kind of dignity in cooking food that has not been improved upon, that does not invite admiration, that simply works. The pretentious recipe wants to be remembered. This one wants only to be eaten. On a Tuesday evening, when the kitchen is small and the day has been long, that is precisely the right ambition for a dish to have, and the longer I cook the more grateful I am that someone, once, taught me a meal whose only quiet promise was to be there. The recipes I keep are the ones that ask nothing of me except that I make them again.