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Lentils and Rice
3 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1/2 cupful lentils 1/2 cupful milk 1/2 cupful water 1 teaspoonful curry powder 1 small onion 1 tablespoonful lemon juice 1 cupful boiled rice Salt and pepper to taste Wash lentils and soak them in milk twelve hours. Melt Crisco, slice onion and fry a pale brown, add curry powder, milk, water, seasonings, and lentils, simmer two hours and add lemon juice just before serving. Serve with rice.
A plain curried lentil stew from the era when Crisco-sponsored cookbooks were pushing the new shortening into every course. Two details need attention before you start: the overnight milk soak and the two-hour simmer.
- The milk soakSoak the lentils in milk in the refrigerator, not on the counter. Twelve hours at room temperature will sour the milk and it may curdle into grains when heated; cold soaking keeps it sweet, and the lentils absorb it just as well.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, present here because the book was written to promote it. Butter, ghee or a neutral oil all work, and ghee suits the curry powder better.
- Which lentilsUse whole brown or green lentils. Red or split lentils dissolve entirely and need no soak at all, which defeats the method.
- Simmering timeTwo hours is far longer than soaked lentils require. Soaked brown lentils are tender in 25 to 35 minutes; check at 25 and stop when they hold their shape but crush easily. Keep the heat low and the liquid barely moving so the milk does not scorch or break.
- LiquidHalf a cup each of milk and water will not carry the lentils through a long cook. Have another half cup of water at hand and add it as needed; the finished dish should be thick and spoonable, not dry.
- Bloom the curry powderAdding the powder to the hot fat with the onion, as written, is the point of the sequence. Give it 30 seconds in the fat before any liquid goes in, or the spice tastes raw and dusty.
- Lemon at the endAcid is generally held to slow pulses from softening, and it can curdle the milk. Add the lemon juice at the very last moment, as the recipe directs ('just before serving').
- YieldHalf a cup of dry lentils with a cupful of cooked rice makes a small dish: two modest main-course servings, or four as a side.
This comes from the wave of American cookbooks published in the 1910s and 1920s under the sponsorship of Procter & Gamble, in which every recipe calls for Crisco, launched in 1911 as the first widely marketed hydrogenated vegetable shortening. The dish itself is a domesticated Anglo-Indian one: lentils, onion, commercial curry powder and rice, a simplified relative of the dals that British households in India encountered. Pre-blended curry powder was a British commercial adaptation of Indian spice mixtures rather than an Indian product in itself, advertised for sale in London from the late eighteenth century, and by the time this book appeared it had become a standard signal for "Indian" flavour in American kitchens. The milk soak is the unusual touch here.