Names of Indian vegetarian dishes

Before you enter an Indian restaurant and ask for any of Indian vegetarian dishes (their whole cuisine is meatless), it is good to know what you are actually going to eat. Most Indian vegetarian dishes are served under their original names, so it may sometimes be difficult to choose something that you'd really like to eat.

The most popular Indian vegetarian dishes are: dal, sambar, dahi and curries. Dal (pronounced also as dhal or daal) is thick spicy stew made of some kind of a pulse (usually rice). Sambar is its milder cousin, made of lentils and vegetables, usually served with rice. Dahi is a kind of natural yogurt, usually eaten as a dessert or poured on the rice and curries can be any hot and spicy dish that relies on curry to make it tastier (and hotter). Of course, there are hundreds other Indian vegetarian dishes, but knowing these four should let you maneuver if you're going to taste the Indian cuisine for the first time and you won't like showing how little you know.

Also, it is wise to keep in mind that most Indian vegetarian dishes' names can be transcribed in several ways. Both because of imperfections of the transcription process and spelling mistakes and the fact that the same word in various dialects of languages used in India have different pronunciations, the names in the menu might look different from restaurant to restaurant. For example, “dal” can be written down also as “daal” and “dhal”, and “sambar” is often spelled “sambaar”, so don't get confused – it is still the same dish!