Lentil Soup
1 cupful lentils 2 cupfuls milk 3 tablespoonfuls Crisco 3 pints stock or water 1 onion 1 carrot 2 stalks celery 1 tablespoonful flour 1 bay leaf Salt and pepper to taste 1/4 cupful cream Croutons Wash lentils; soak twenty-four hours; drain well. Cut onion, carrot and celery into small pieces, then put them into a saucepan with Crisco, cover, and cook gently for fifteen minutes. Add stock and simmer 2 hours, then rub through sieve. Return to pan, add milk, seasonings, and bring to boil. Moisten flour with 1/2 cupful milk or stock, add it to soup and simmer five minutes. Season to taste and add cream. Serve with croutons of fried or toasted bread. Lentils are a small leguminous seed, not so generally known as beans, but an excellent nitrogenous food, containing about 25 per cent. protein, more than 50 per cent. starch, with over 2 per cent. fat. They are not used as much as they ought to be.
Croutons are made by cutting bread into tiny cubes and browning through and through in hot oven or putting into a frying pan with 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco and browning well. If latter is used great care must be used as the croutons will brown easily.
A straightforward purée soup from a Crisco promotional cookbook, with a few instructions that reflect the lentils of a century ago rather than the ones on the shelf now.
- When to add the lentilsThe method never says. Add the drained lentils along with the stock, before the two-hour simmer; the vegetables sweat in the fat on their own first.
- Skip the 24-hour soakModern lentils are cleaned, sorted and generally younger than the ones this book assumed. They need no soaking at all — rinse, pick over for stones, and go straight into the pot.
- Two hours is far too longBrown or green lentils collapse in 30 to 40 minutes; red ones in 20. Simmering two hours risks scorching the bottom and reduces the liquid considerably. Cook until they fall apart, then purée.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, the product this book exists to sell. Butter or a neutral oil does the same job in the same quantity — 3 tablespoons for the vegetables, 2 for the croutons.
- The sieve"Rub through a sieve" means force the cooked solids through a fine strainer with a wooden spoon or pestle. A blender or stick blender does it in seconds; pass it through a strainer afterwards if you want the old smoothness.
- The flour thickeningA tablespoon of raw flour slaked in cold milk needs more than five minutes to lose its taste. Give it ten at a bare simmer, stirring, or omit it — well-puréed lentils thicken the soup on their own.
- Liquid and consistencyThree pints of stock plus two cups of milk plus cream makes a thin soup by current taste. Hold back some of the milk and add it at the end to the thickness you want.
- YieldRoughly two quarts finished, or six to eight servings as a first course.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for the Procter & Gamble Company, which is why Crisco turns up in a lentil soup that has no structural need of it — the book was published to teach American cooks what to do with a hydrogenated shortening introduced in 1911. The nutritional aside about lentils being "an excellent nitrogenous food" is pure period vocabulary: protein was widely discussed as "nitrogenous" matter in early-twentieth-century domestic science, and cookbooks of the era routinely quoted percentage compositions to argue a food's economy. Neil's complaint that lentils "are not used as much as they ought to be" was a common one in English-language cookery writing of the time, where the pulse was associated chiefly with Continental and Middle Eastern kitchens; the purée-and-sieve treatment here, finished with cream and croutons, is the standard French potage formula applied to make an unfamiliar legume respectable at an American table.