Kilkass bi Adas

the Lebanese coast's winter dish of taro and brown lentils drowned in lemon juice and crushed garlic, eaten hot with bread and cold the next day

Origin: Beirut, Tripoli & the Lebanese Coast

From the journey of Taro.

Kilkass is a coastal vegetable in Lebanon and Syria rather than a mountain one, grown on the plain around Tripoli and Sidon where the water table is high, and it comes to market for a few months of winter and then goes. Its season overlaps with the citrus harvest, which is convenient, because the dish it belongs to uses lemon in quantities that would be absurd applied to anything else. Kilkass bi adas is taro and brown lentils boiled together until both are soft, then finished with the juice of three or four lemons and a paste of crushed garlic beaten with salt. The proportion of acid is the point. Taro is flat and heavy on its own, and the lemon lifts it; the acid is also doing a second job, finishing on the calcium oxalate what the long boil began, which is why every Levantine cook adds it generously and adds it late. It is fasting food. Lebanese Christians eat it through the Lenten weeks and on the eves of feasts, and it belongs to the same family of frugal, lemon-sharp, meatless winter dishes as mujaddara and adas bi hamod. There is no meat in it and none is wanted; the lentils supply what the taro does not. The alternative version replaces the lentils with tahini, thinned with lemon and water into a pale sauce poured over the boiled corm, and is eaten cold as a mezze. Coastal families tend to have a firm opinion about which is the proper dish, and the two are best regarded as the same argument conducted in different accents.

Ingredients

Stew

  • 900 g taro (kilkass), peeled and cut into 4cm chunks
  • 250 g brown or green lentils, rinsed
  • 1.5 litres water
  • 2 onions, finely chopped
  • 90 ml olive oil
  • 2 tsp salt, or to taste
  • 1 tsp freshly ground black pepper

To finish

  • 10 garlic cloves, crushed to a paste with a little salt
  • 150 ml lemon juice, from about 4 lemons
  • 30 g fresh coriander leaf, finely chopped
  • 1 tsp ground coriander

Method

  1. Peel the taro dry and wear gloves, since the sap causes fierce itching. Cut it into large chunks rather than small.
  2. Bring the lentils and water to the boil in a large pot and simmer for fifteen minutes, skimming any foam.
  3. Meanwhile soften the onions in half the olive oil over a low heat for ten minutes until sweet and golden.
  4. Add the taro chunks and the onions to the lentils with the salt and pepper, and simmer, half covered, for thirty minutes.
  5. Test both. The lentils should be soft but still holding, and the taro entirely tender with no firm centre; undercooked taro will burn the mouth and throat.
  6. If the pot looks thin, simmer it uncovered for a further ten minutes. It should be soupy but not watery, since the taro thickens it as it goes.
  7. Fry the crushed garlic and ground coriander in the remaining olive oil for under a minute, until fragrant and barely coloured, then stir in the fresh coriander leaf and take it off the heat at once.
  8. Stir this into the pot and put the lid on for two minutes.
  9. Take the pot off the heat and pour in the lemon juice. It goes in off the heat, because boiling flattens it and the sharpness is the whole design.
  10. Taste, and add more lemon. It should be assertively sour, more so than seems reasonable before you have eaten it with bread.
  11. Serve hot with flatbread, or leave it to cool and eat it at room temperature the next day, which many households consider the better of the two.

Notes

Do not stint the lemon. Acid is what makes the dish palatable and it is also finishing the work on the calcium oxalate that the boiling started, so a timid hand here produces something both flat and faintly irritating. Add it off the heat. Frozen peeled taro from a Middle Eastern grocer is entirely adequate and saves the handling; if using it, shorten the simmer by about ten minutes since it cooks faster. Brown lentils hold their shape better than red, which collapse and turn the dish to purée. For the tahini version, boil the taro alone, then pour over 150g of tahini slaked with the same lemon juice, the garlic, and enough cold water to make a pouring sauce, and serve it cold.

The Gastrographer

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Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control
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