LENTILS FOR MY FERRITIN LEVELS

Milan, 4 November 2024

It is a sad fact of life that as one gets older, the machine that is our body begins to falter. Machine parts begin to show signs of wear and tear, leading to unfavourable results in blood, urine or other samples of our vital fluids. One such unfavourable result which has been dogging me for a number of years is the levels of ferritin in my blood. My old doctor had been monitoring it, and shortly before he retired he decided that the time had probably come for me to do some regular blood-letting to bring the ferritin levels down. Luckily, the liver specialist which he sent me to – high ferritin levels being normally due to some malfunction in the liver – didn’t agree, recommending continuing monitoring. At which point, I decided to see what I could do to bring down my ferritin levels naturally, through my diet. I had already pretty much completely eliminated red meat, which is high in heme iron. That was pretty sad, but I comforted myself with the thought that it was good for the planet. My daughter found a scientific article online, which recommended a diet high on berries, especially blueberries, and the liberal use of cocoa powder – it seems that the polyphenols which these contain can help bring ferritin levels down. I did that for several months and then did the blood tests again. There was a modest decrease in my ferritin levels. I asked my new doctor what else I could do. She suggested imbibing lots of tea and eating lots of pulses – they, too, contain high levels of polyphenols. Well, my wife and I are already regular tea-drinkers, carrying on a fine British tradition.

So I didn’t see much scope for improvement there. Pulses were a different story. Quite frankly, we don’t eat many of those; we’re not terribly, terribly fond of them. We’ll eat pasta e fagioli once or twice a year, normally when winter sets in; this particular version has used penne rigate and cannellini beans.

And come Christmas time, we’ll often have ourselves a popular Christmas dish in northern Italy, cotechino e lenticchie, a type of sausage with lentils. I’ve already covered this dish exhaustively in a previous post, so I won’t say any more here. I just invite readers to drool over this photo.

That is pretty much the sum total of our annual pulse intake. After some discussion, my wife and I agreed that I could go with lentils. I quite like lentils in salad, so I’ve been regularly eating a lentil salad for lunch and dinner. But I fear I’ll get rather bored with having this all the time, and might need to branch out. What other lentil dishes could I try?

Well, for starters, I could eat nice mixed salads like this one, of fennels and lentils.

But that is really just a modest change to the original dish. What else?

Well, given that the original wild lentil plant comes from the Middle East and was domesticated there (like so many of our foodstuffs), I’m thinking I should start by looking there for a lentil dish I could try. And in fact, it so happens that there is a very popular lentil dish in the Middle East which goes by the name of mujaddara. It’s a very simple dish: it’s a mix of lentils and rice, with a topping of caramelised onions. You can season it with cumin, mint, or coriander (although I would skip the coriander, which I don’t like).

It’s considered a poor person’s dish, but if you’ve got money to burn you can add meat to the mix. The dish is generally served with a side of yoghurt or a salad.

Going off on a tangent, I’m blown away by the etymology of the dish’s name. Mujaddara means “pockmarked”, a reference to the look of the dish, brown lentils pockmarking the white rice. It would be nice to think that whoever came up with this name was thinking of a face pockmarked by bad acne, but I rather fear that they were referring instead to pockmarks caused by the dreaded smallpox, like in this recreation from earlier centuries.

But back to mujaddara. I have to say, I’m intrigued by the Egyptian variant, koshari. To the rice, lentils and caramelised onions, the Egyptians add pasta (macaroni or vermicelli), and tomato sauce. You can make it even more complicated, by adding other odds and ends as this photo shows.

In all of this, it’s the tomato sauce that attracts me, I’m a great fan of the tomato in all its forms. But this is not the type of tomato sauce I’m used to. To the basic sauce base is added garlic vinegar or even a lemon sauce. Garlic vinegar I will forget, but the addition of a lemon sauce … that’s worth considering.

Hang on, though. I think I’m getting rather far away from the lentils, which is the whole point here but which seems to be getting drowned out by all the other stuff that’s being added in. In Obelix’s day, it did indeed seem much simpler in Egypt; it was just lentils – although Obelix is finding that a tough diet to keep to.

In any event, I need to keep my eye fixed on the simpler mujaddara.

Talking of which, it seems that the simple, no-frills mujaddara has a long, long history. It looks like the Palestinian version of mujaddara is closer to the original version of this dish. Instead of the rice, they use bulgur, which is parboiled and cut durum wheat – rice probably wasn’t in common use in the Middle East until Roman times. It would seem, then, that mujaddara is a member of the broad family of pottages, where various grains are boiled up together to form a sort of porridge (various vegetables can be added, too). So it must be a descendant of the “mess of pottage” for which Esau gave away his birthright to his twin brother Jacob. Here is how the story is recounted in the King James version of the Old Testament (I always find the KJV text so much more satisfying to read; it’s rather like Shakespeare):

And Jacob sod [prepared] pottage. And Esau came from the field, and he was faint. And Esau said to Jacob, “Feed me, I pray thee, with that same red pottage; for I am faint” … And Jacob said, “Sell me this day thy birthright”. And Esau said, “Behold, I am at the point to die: and what profit shall this birthright do to me?” And Jacob said, “Swear to me this day”; and he sware unto him. And he sold his birthright unto Jacob. Then Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentiles; and he did eat and drink, and rose up, and went his way. Thus Esau despised his birthright.

Just for the hell of it, I throw in a painting by the Dutch painter Jan Victors that depicts this scene; Jacob is to the right, Esau to the left.

As much as domesticated rice travelled westward from India to the Middle East (and beyond), so the domesticated lentil travelled eastward from the Middle East to India. The peoples along the way continued mixing lentils with rice, with some changes to the basic recipe. Which means that there are possible mujaddara variants for me to try. For instance, Iranians have a dish they call adas polo, where dates, raisins, cinnamon and saffron are added to the basic lentil-rice mix.

The sites I’ve read up on adas polo say that it has a very different flavour profile from mujaddara, which, looking at the ingredients, I can well believe. Adas polo certainly looks enticing, but I feel that, like koshari, it’s too complicated. Maybe I’ll just leave it to the next time I go to a Persian restaurant (there are some really good Persian restaurants in Vienna).

Going further east, the Indians also have their lentil-rice dish, khichdi. I mentioned khichdi in a post I wrote a number of years ago about a pale British imitation of this dish, kedgeree. Basically, you bring together rice, lentils in the form of a dal, some vegetables like cauliflower or peas or potato, and spices.

Bringing in khichdi has allowed me to surreptitiously slip in that glory of Indian cuisine, dal. Quite honestly, there are probably as many variations of dal as there are Indian families. The base is always the same: lentils or other pulses like peas or beans which are cooked with turmeric until mushy. The endless variations come with the fried garnish which is added at the end of the cooking process. I throw in a photo of a moong dal, where the garnish has been made by frying asafoetida, cumin seeds, chopped green chilies, and chopped garlic in ghee.

If I go for dal, I would have to find a garnish with no – and I mean no – hot spices in it; as I’ve recalled several times in this blog, I actively dislike hot spices.

Which would also create me a problem with another dish, misir wot or kik wot, which hails from Ethiopia.

Just as domesticated lentils travelled east and west out of the Middle East, they must have travelled south, too. I suspect they got to Ethiopia via Yemen. In any event, here, too, you cook the lentils (or other pulses) with a garnish made of onions, garlic, ginger, tomatoes and berbere fried in niter kibbeh (the Ethiopian equivalent to ghee). The red flag here is berbere, which is a spice mixture liberally used throughout the Ethiopian highlands and usually containing “chili peppers, coriander, garlic, ginger, Ethiopian holy basil seeds, korarima, rue, ajwain or nadhuni, nigella and fenugreek”, according to berbere‘s Wikipedia entry. I’m not sure what some of the more local spices taste like, but chili peppers … that’s bad news for me.

Stepping back here and reviewing all the alternatives I’ve mentioned makes me realise that most if not all of them are based on making a soupy or slurry-like lentil dish. Remembering the adage “East, West, Home’s best“, maybe I should just opt for a simple lentil soup like my mother used to make (she actually didn’t, but readers get the idea). The internet is stuffed with recipes for lentil soups without horrible, nasty, hot spices in them; without onions and garlic, which don’t agree with my digestive system; without a bunch of spices which, if we buy, would mean a row of bottles that would sit on our kitchen shelves for ever more. Maybe this is the way I should go when I get bored with my lentil salads. And maybe, when the world just gets too much for me, I could retreat into my infancy and eat my lentils in milk, a comfort food which my mother actually did make for me and my siblings years and years ago.