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Lentil-Flour Soup
Required, two quarts of bone stock, two large cooked potatoes, two ounces of lentil flour (some will like it thicker, then three ounces will be needed), a large onion, a carrot, a turnip, and a bunch of herbs, a few peppercorns, a couple of cloves, a table-spoonful of Bovril, a bit of butter and a pinch of sugar. Prepare the vegetables by slicing the onion and turnip, and grating the carrot, and cook them for a few minutes in the melted butter with the herbs and seasonings. The stock should be skimmed after being brought to the boil, then added, and all boiled until tender enough to strain through a sieve. Mix the lentil flour with cold water to a paste, and add with the potatoes, mashed, and boil up for twenty minutes; stir the Bovril in, and serve with fried bread or toast. Dried mint is often liked with this, which is a delicious soup, very digestible, and so nourishing that meat at the same meal is superfluous.
A late-Victorian invalid-and-economy soup that works well as written, once you have sorted out the lentil flour and the Bovril. The vegetables are cooked, sieved and discarded as solids only after they have given up their flavour, so do not rush that stage.
- Quantities in modern termsTwo quarts is about 2.3 litres by the imperial measure this book would have used (8 US cups is nearer 1.9 litres). Two ounces of lentil flour is roughly 1/2 cup, three ounces about 3/4 cup. The recipe gives no yield; it would stretch to about six as a first course, or four as the meal the text intends.
- Lentil flourSold today as lentil or red-lentil flour in South Asian and gluten-free ranges; besan-style chickpea flour is not the same thing and tastes markedly different. You can grind split red lentils to a powder in a spice mill or blender.
- Slaking the flourThe paste of lentil flour and cold water is the hinge of the recipe. Tip dry flour into hot stock and it sets into lumps that will not sieve out; mix it smooth and cold first, then stir it in off the boil.
- BovrilA concentrated beef extract, still made, and still the closest thing to what the book means. A tablespoon of any beef bouillon concentrate does the same job. It goes in at the end because prolonged boiling flattens its flavour and concentrates its salt.
- SaltBetween bone stock and a tablespoon of meat extract, the soup can arrive salty without any salt being added. Season only after the Bovril has gone in.
- Bone stock"Skimmed after being brought to the boil" assumes a homemade stock with fat and scum on it. With shop-bought stock there is nothing to skim; go straight to adding it to the sweated vegetables.
- The twenty-minute boilTwenty minutes at a full boil after the flour goes in is longer than needed to cook lentil flour, but it does thicken the soup by reduction. A gentle simmer with occasional stirring avoids scorching the starch on the pan bottom.
- FinishingDried mint is worth taking seriously here — a good pinch rubbed between the palms over each bowl lifts what is otherwise a heavy, earthy purée.
Lentil flour soups belong to a whole late-nineteenth-century genre of "nourishing" invalid and economy cookery, written when protein was understood as the measure of a food's worth and pulses were promoted as a cheap substitute for meat, hence the closing claim that meat at the same meal is superfluous. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery was a large household compendium of the 1880s and 90s, and its inclusion of Bovril dates the recipe fairly precisely: the beef extract was developed by the Scot John Lawson Johnston in the mid-1870s to supply the French army, the contract usually placed at 1873-74, and was marketed under the Bovril name from the mid-1880s, going on to become a fixture of British kitchens and sickrooms. The dried mint is the older layer of the dish; mint with pulses is long-standing in both British and eastern Mediterranean cooking, where it is generally credited with making beans and lentils easier to digest.