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Savory Lentil Dish
4 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 1 cupful lentils 1 bay leaf 3 springs parsley 1 chopped onion Salt, pepper, and powdered mace to taste 1 cupful boiled rice 1 1/2 cupfuls highly seasoned tomato sauce Wash lentils and soak in plenty of cold water four hours. Put into boiling salt water, add bay leaf, parsley, seasonings and cook till tender. Chop and fry onion in 3 tablespoonfuls of Crisco, add lentils, rice and remainder of Crisco, stir and allow to get hot. Turn into hot dish and pour over tomato sauce.
A straightforward lentil and rice dish from a Crisco promotional cookbook, where the shortening is doing advertising work as much as cooking. The points below cover the fat, the soak, and the seasoning.
- CriscoCrisco here is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and it appears in nearly every recipe in this book because the book was published to sell it. Four tablespoons of butter, olive oil or any neutral oil will do the same job, and oil suits the tomato sauce better.
- The four-hour soak is optionalModern split or small brown lentils do not need soaking at all and will be tender in 20 to 30 minutes. If the lentils are old, a soak shortens the cooking; it will not rescue lentils that have gone stale and refuse to soften.
- Cook till tender means firm, not collapsedBrown or green lentils hold their shape at about 25 minutes. Push much past that and they break down into a purée, which the subsequent frying and saucing will not disguise. Taste at 20 minutes.
- Drain wellThe recipe never says to drain, but the lentils must be drained before they go into the pan or the dish will be soupy under the sauce. Lift out and discard the bay leaf and parsley sprigs at the same time.
- MacePowdered mace is the outer sheath of nutmeg, milder and less sweet. Use a scant quarter teaspoon; a similar quantity of grated nutmeg substitutes, though it comes forward more strongly.
- Highly seasoned tomato sauceThe book assumes a cook who already has a seasoned tomato sauce to hand. A cup and a half of a plain, well-salted tomato sauce will do — it is the only acidity in the dish and should taste sharp on its own.
- Boiled riceOne cupful means cooked rice, roughly a third of a cup dry. Long-grain, cooked dry and separate, keeps the texture; sticky rice turns the mixture pasty.
- YieldAbout four servings as a main dish, six alongside something else. It reheats well but wants a fresh spoonful of sauce.
This comes from A Calendar of Dinners, one of the recipe collections issued to promote Crisco after its 1911 introduction — the shortening appears in essentially every recipe, which is why four tablespoons of it turn up in a dish that would otherwise ask for butter or oil. The lentil-and-rice pairing itself is far older and far more widespread than the book, appearing across the eastern Mediterranean and South Asia in forms such as mujaddara and khichri; the combination of pulse and grain is a staple partly because it eats well and partly because it was cheap. What marks this version as early-twentieth-century American is the treatment: bay, parsley and mace rather than cumin or fried onions cooked to a deep brown, and a tomato sauce poured over at the table.