Three Whistles

Three whistles, flame off, and then you leave it completely alone until the pressure drops on its own. That is the entire method and it produces dal that holds its shape.

Four whistles produces dal that has surrendered. It is smoother, I will grant that, and if you are going to put it through a masher anyway then the argument collapses and my mother wins. But I am not mashing it. I want to be able to see that it used to be something.

The part nobody tells you is the waiting. Opening it early with the little pressure-release trick works and it also ruins the texture, and for about two years I did it every single time because I was hungry at eight o'clock and the alternative was being hungry at eight fifteen.

Now I put the rice on when the third whistle goes. By the time the rice is done the cooker has come down by itself and I have not made a single decision under pressure, which turns out to be the actual skill in cooking for yourself.

The man at the corner shop said take two kilos, it works out better, and he was right about the arithmetic and completely wrong about my life.

I am one person. I use, at a generous estimate, one onion a day. Two kilos is somewhere between fourteen and eighteen onions depending on how the bag was assembled, which means I have committed to just over a fortnight of onion-based cooking before anything else can happen in this kitchen.

By day four they had started to smell like a decision I had made. I put them in a steel dabba with the lid off, in the dark part under the counter, which is what everyone tells you to do and which works, and they are fine.

The real lesson is not about onions. It is that a good per-kilo price on something perishable is a good price for a family and a trap for one person, and every shop in the city is priced for a family.

Day one it is a list of ingredients that happen to be in the same pot. Day two they have started talking. Day three it is one thing.

No restaurant can sell you this, because a restaurant has to make it fresh to make it at all, and the thing that makes it good is time that nobody can charge for.

This is the only genuine advantage of cooking for one. Almost everything else about it is worse. But I get day three and a family of five never does, because in a family of five there is no day three.

It is not the best of the six. It is slightly smaller than two of them and it has a chip on the underside of the rim where it caught the tap.

What it has is the right weight. I did not know a plate could have a right weight until I noticed I was choosing this one every evening, out of a stack, without thinking about it, and had been for over a year.

The other five come out when somebody visits, which happens perhaps once a fortnight. So five plates exist entirely to make me look like a person with a normal kitchen, and one plate does the actual work.

I bought all six together. If I had bought one at a time I would have found this one in a shop, held it, and never bought the other five, and I would have been better off. There is no way to know that in a shop and no shop is arranged to let you find out.