Boil 1 quart of lentils until tender; then heat 2 tablespoonfuls of butter. Add 1 chopped onion and stir in 1 tablespoonful of flour until brown; add some cold water mixed with vinegar. Let boil and pour the sauce over the lentils. Season with salt and pepper, and serve with small boiled sausages. Sprinkle the top with bread-crumbs fried in butter until brown.
A plain German lentil pot thickened with a browned roux and sharpened with vinegar. The original assumes you know how much vinegar to use and how long lentils take, so those are the two places to be careful.
- The quantity is largeA quart of dry lentils is roughly 1.75 lb and will swell to something like two to three quarts cooked. That feeds eight to ten as a main dish. Halve it unless you are cooking for a crowd or want leftovers, which reheat well.
- Which lentilsBrown or green lentils, or the German Tellerlinsen, hold their shape through the sauce. Red and yellow lentils collapse into purée and will not work here. Cover by two inches of unsalted water and simmer 25 to 35 minutes; modern lentils need no overnight soak.
- Salt at the endThe recipe seasons last, and that is correct. Salting the cooking water is fine, but acid is not: keep the vinegar out until the lentils are tender or the skins stay tough.
- The roux is the hinge"Stir in 1 tablespoonful of flour until brown" means cooking the flour in the butter past pale blond to the colour of a hazelnut, which takes three or four minutes over medium heat and supplies most of the flavour. Rushed or scorched, the whole dish tastes of it.
- The vinegar is unmeasuredThe original says only "some cold water mixed with vinegar." A workable reading is about a cup of the lentil cooking liquid with 1 to 2 tablespoonfuls of cider or white wine vinegar, added off the heat to the roux and whisked smooth. Taste and add more vinegar at the end; sour-sharp is the point of the dish.
- Sausages"Small boiled sausages" in a German context means Wiener or Frankfurter-style links, or the thin Swabian Saitenwürstle. Poach them in barely simmering water for eight to ten minutes; boiling hard splits the skins.
- The crumb toppingFry coarse dry breadcrumbs in butter over medium heat, stirring constantly, until they are evenly brown, then scatter them on at the table. Added early they go soft and there is no reason to bother with them.
Lentils with vinegar and sausage is standard cooking across southwestern Germany, and Baden and neighbouring Swabia both claim versions; the Swabian pairing of Linsen mit Spätzle und Saitenwürstle is the best-known relative. The recipe itself is headed simply "German"; Baden is an attribution added here, not the book's. Lentils were a cheap, storable legume that grew on thin upland soil, and the sour note is characteristic of the region's cooking, where vinegar does the work that wine or cream does elsewhere. The browned-flour sauce, called a Mehlschwitze, is the workhorse thickener of nineteenth-century German household cookery and appears in dozens of dishes in books of this period. A day-book like this one reflects an American appetite for cosmopolitan menus drawn largely from the cuisines of recent immigrant communities, German among them.