To 1 gallon of soup stock, add 1 quart of lentils. Let boil until lentils are soft, with 1 sliced onion. Then add some small sausages. Let boil five minutes. Season to taste and serve the soup with the sausages and croutons fried in butter.
February 18 — No. 18
German
A one-line recipe that assumes a stockpot and a household to feed. The proportions are sound but the quantities are enormous by present standards, and the sausage instruction needs a second look.
- Scale it downOne gallon of stock and one quart of lentils will yield roughly 12 to 16 bowls. For four to six people, use 2 quarts of stock to 2 cups of dry lentils and 2 or 3 sausages, keeping the same ratio of about 1 part lentils to 4 parts liquid.
- A quart of lentils is a weight, not a scoopA dry quart of lentils is close to 2 pounds, or about 4 1/2 cups. They swell to two and a half times that volume, so the finished pot will be thick — thin it with more stock if you want soup rather than pottage.
- Lentil type and timingBrown or green lentils hold their shape in 25 to 35 minutes and need no soaking; the old German choice would have been a small brown field lentil. Red lentils collapse entirely in about 15 minutes and will give you a purée, which is not what the sliced onion and croutons are dressed for.
- The sausages are the hingeFive minutes only works for a fully cooked sausage — a frankfurter, knackwurst or smoked bockwurst dropped in to heat through. A raw fresh sausage such as bratwurst will not be safe in five minutes; brown it separately and finish it in the soup, or poach it 20 minutes before slicing it in.
- Season means more than salt"Season to taste" in a German lentil soup conventionally includes a splash of vinegar at the end, along with pepper and a bay leaf. The acid is what keeps a heavy lentil pot from tasting flat.
- Stock quality carries the dishWith no fat, no bacon and no root vegetables specified, everything rests on the stock. A ham or smoked-pork stock is the traditional base; a plain unsalted chicken or beef stock will need building up with a smoked hock or a scrap of bacon.
- CroutonsCubed stale bread fried in butter over medium heat until golden, drained, and scattered at the table rather than stirred in — they soften within a minute or two in the bowl.
Linsensuppe is one of the oldest fixtures of the German kitchen, a cheap keeping-food built on a pulse that stores for years and cooks without soaking. It belongs to the family of dishes Germans call Eintopf — one pot, meat and starch and vegetable together — and in most regions it arrives with sausage stuck in it, whether a slim Wiener in the north or a coil of Saitenwurst in Swabia. Lentils with sausage are also widely eaten at New Year in German-speaking countries, the small round seeds being said to stand for coins; that association is traditional rather than documented to any particular origin. Its presence here, in a book that assigns one national dish to each day of the year, reflects how American cookbooks of the period treated German cooking as familiar, homely and thrifty — no explanation offered.