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LENTILS, BOILED (superior method)
Boil the lentils as in the last recipe, and drain them. Melt an ounce of butter in a clean stewpan, and fry in it a small onion, very finely chopped. Stir in a tea-spoonful of flour, and mix to a smooth paste. Add boiling stock flavoured with vinegar to make a thick sauce, put in the boiled lentils, and simmer for ten or fifteen minutes. Serve in a tureen. If preferred, the vinegar can be omitted.
A short lentil side dish built on a roux-thickened onion sauce, written in the shorthand of a book where the preceding entry supplied the boiling instructions. The only things missing are quantities and a sense of scale.
- The missing first step"As in the last recipe" points back to plainly boiled lentils; the preceding entry, not reproduced here, supplied the method. Brown or green lentils take 25-35 minutes and hold their shape; red split lentils collapse and are wrong here.
- QuantitiesNone are given for the lentils, only for the butter and flour, so the scale has to be judged by eye: enough sauce to coat, not to swim. Scale the butter and flour together if you cook more.
- Stock and thickeningThe flour must cook in the butter for a minute or two before liquid goes in, or the sauce tastes pasty. Adding the stock boiling, as directed, is the point: it lets a very small amount of roux thicken without lumping. Add it a little at a time and stop while the sauce is still thick, as the recipe specifies.
- The vinegarA teaspoon or two of a sharp vinegar into the stock, not a splash over the finished dish. Lentils are flat and starchy and the acid is what makes the plate read as seasoned. The book offers to omit it; the dish is duller without.
- Chop the onion properly"Very finely chopped" is not incidental. The onion is never strained out, so anything coarse stays as a raw-textured lump in the sauce. Sweat it soft and pale rather than browning it.
- The final simmerTen to fifteen minutes with lentils that are already cooked is about flavour, not tenderness. Keep it at a bare simmer and stir occasionally; a hard boil will break the lentils down into the sauce.
- ServingThe recipe directs a tureen, as it would for other loosely sauced dishes. Treat this as a side with roast or boiled meat, or as a supper dish with bread. Salt at the end, since stock varies.
Cassell's placed lentils among the vegetables and pulses that a thrifty Victorian kitchen was expected to know how to handle, and this "superior method" is really an argument that pulses deserve a sauce rather than just a pot of water. Lentils had a slightly foreign reputation in nineteenth-century Britain, associated with Continental cookery, and with Lenten and vegetarian eating; the plain boiled version was economical fare, while the buttered, floured, onion-scented treatment lifted it toward the table of a household that could afford choices. The technique itself is textbook English kitchen practice of the period: a small roux, boiling stock added, and a sharpening of vinegar. The vinegar is offered as optional.