A Manipuri household dal of moong simmered with turmeric and finished with culantro leaves fried in oil, the herb Meitei cooks call Burmese coriander
Origin: Imphal & Manipur
From the journey of Culantro.
In Meitei, the language of the Imphal valley, culantro is awa phadigom. Phadigom is coriander and awa is Burma, so the name means Burmese coriander, and it records the direction from which the plant was understood to have come: from the east, over the hills from the Irrawaddy country. How and when it arrived nobody has established. It is now one of the most characteristic flavours of Manipuri cooking, and of the whole of north-eastern India, where Mizo calls it bahkhawr and Tripura bilati dhonia, foreign coriander. Manipuri cooks use it in a particular way. The leaves are chopped fine and fried in oil before they go into a dish, which tames their rawness and brings out a deeper, rounder smell, and they are valued above all with meat, because they take away the heavy smell of cooked flesh. They also go raw into eromba, the vegetable and fermented fish mash, into singju salads, and into pickles. This dal is the simplest demonstration: yellow moong boiled soft with turmeric and salt, and a tempering of fried awa phadigom poured over at the end. It is the recipe that accompanied a 2019 article on the herb in Down to Earth, in which the Manipuri cook Jeena Sorokhaibam explained its name, and it is the kind of everyday dish that shows how ordinary the herb has become in the valley.
If using mustard oil, heat it until it smokes lightly first to take off its raw edge. The same fried awa phadigom is stirred into meat curries at the end of cooking.
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