Boil 1 cup of lentils with 1 bay-leaf, 2 sprigs of parsley, a pinch of salt and pepper to taste; add some mace and cook until tender. Then fry 1 chopped onion in 2 tablespoonfuls of olive-oil; add the lentils and 1 cup of cooked rice and 1 tablespoonful of butter. Stir well together and let get very hot. Put on a platter and pour over a highly seasoned tomato-sauce and serve. Garnish with fried parsley.
A lentil-and-rice dish of the mujaddara family, written in the compressed style of a page-a-day book. The original assumes you know how much water to use and what a highly seasoned tomato sauce is; both are worth pinning down.
- Cooking liquidNo water quantity is given. Use about 3 cups of water or light stock to 1 cup of lentils, in a covered pan, and drain off any excess before combining. Brown or green lentils hold their shape and take 20-30 minutes; red lentils collapse into actual puree in about 15, which may be what the title intends.
- Salt the lentils lateSalt -- The recipe adds salt at the start. Some cooks prefer to salt lentils only in the last ten minutes, on the theory that older dry stock stays stubborn in salted water, though this is disputed.
- MaceMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, warmer and less sweet than nutmeg itself. "Some mace" means a blade or two, or about a quarter teaspoon ground; it dominates quickly.
- The onion is the flavourTwo tablespoons of olive oil and one chopped onion, taken well past translucent to a deep brown, is the hinge of the dish. Pale onion leaves it flat. Ten to fifteen minutes over medium heat, not three.
- RiceOne cup of already-cooked rice, not raw. Long-grain, cooked plain and cooled slightly, keeps the grains separate when stirred into the lentils.
- Tomato sauceNothing is specified, so build a simple one: garlic softened in olive oil, a can of crushed tomatoes, salt, and a good deal of pepper or a pinch of cayenne. Simmer it 20 minutes while the lentils cook. "Highly seasoned" is doing real work here, since the base is deliberately mild.
- Fried parsleyWhole flat sprigs, dried thoroughly, dropped into hot oil for a few seconds until they stop hissing and turn brittle and dark green. Wet parsley spits badly; pat it dry first.
- YieldServes three or four as a main dish, six as a side. It reheats well but the rice firms up, so add a splash of water when warming.
Lentils and rice cooked together with fried onions are eaten across the eastern Mediterranean and the Levant under names including mujaddara, mudardara and, in Turkish kitchens, dishes of the mercimekli pilav family; the combination is old enough that no single origin can be claimed for it. This page comes from a book arranged as a dish for every day of the year, and its geography is loose: a label like "Turkish" in such collections may point to the route by which a dish reached the compiler rather than to its origin, so a Levantine or Armenian dish could well end up under that heading. The tomato sauce poured over the top and the butter alongside the olive oil read as adaptations for readers used to European saucing. The title's promise of a puree is not quite met by the method, which leaves the lentils whole unless the red variety is used.