Learning to Shop Hillcroft
Reading the lentil wall on Hillcroft, and what to do with a bag of curry leaves once it's home.
The lentils take up a whole wall. Before the smell of the place even registers, there they are, dozens of kinds of dried legumes in clear bags, stacked by color from the orange of masoor through the yellows of toor and chana and moong up to the black of whole urad. Hillcroft Avenue between the Southwest Freeway and the Westpark Tollway has carried the name Mahatma Gandhi District since 2010, when placards went up over the regular street signs, but the groceries were here long before the placards and don’t need them.
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Most of the wall comes down to five plants. Masoor dal, the split red lentil, is the weeknight bag. It needs no soak and is soft in about twenty minutes. Toor dal, the split pigeon pea, is the one behind most of the dal I’ve eaten in restaurants, and it comes two ways on the shelf, plain and “oily.” The oily bag has a thin coat of vegetable oil to keep insects off during storage, and the label will tell you which oil. It isn’t a defect, but you rinse it until the water runs clear. Chana dal is the small desi chickpea, skinned and split, and it’s the stubborn one. I soak it. Moong comes whole and green, split with the skin still on, or split and yellow, and the three cook like different ingredients. Urad comes black with the skin on, split with the skin, and skinned to a cream color, whole or split, and the skinned bag is what dosa and idli batter are built on. .
Buying is the easy half. The bags are big, and a bag that big only makes sense if you know where it’s going to live. I pour them into jars with lids that seal, write the month on tape, and keep them out of the light, because dried legumes don’t spoil so much as get old, and old lentils take longer than the recipe says and may never quite go soft. If a dal has been in the back of the cabinet for a year and the simmer runs long, that’s the reason. It isn’t the recipe. An overnight soak, or just more time, usually brings it around.
Curry leaves are the other thing worth the trip. They’re sold fresh, on the stem, in small bags, and they’ll sit near the cilantro in one store and up by the register in another, so you learn to ask. The tree is a cousin of citrus and has nothing to do with curry powder, and the leaves smell like that cousin, green and a little like lime peel, with something warm underneath that doesn’t have an English name. Dried ones have lost most of it, which is why the fresh bag matters. I strip what I need for the week and wrap the rest in a paper towel inside a sealed bag in the fridge, where it keeps about two weeks. The overflow gets frozen flat on a sheet pan, stems and all, then tipped into a bag. Frozen leaves go straight into hot oil without thawing, where they sputter and curl and perfume the room in about four seconds. Nobody has ever complained that mine came from the freezer.
I spent a stretch of my career as a retail dietitian, which means I spent it in grocery aisles, and somewhere in there I came to believe that a store is a syllabus if you read it. The produce bins along Hillcroft hold fenugreek leaves, tindora, bitter melon, and drumsticks, the long ridged pods of the moringa tree, sold in bundles. The spice aisle sells cumin seed in bags the size of a paperback, with hardly a jar in sight. A box of asafoetida, hing on most labels, not much bigger than a matchbox sits by the register, because a pinch is a lot. The quantities are telling you how the food gets cooked. Whole spices bought in bulk because they get bloomed in hot oil at nearly every meal, fresh herbs bought weekly, lentils by the kilo. You could work out the shape of the cuisine without opening a cookbook, and the cookbook makes a good deal more sense once you have.
Back at the wall, . The spare curry leaves go in the freezer before I so much as take my shoes off.
