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Lentil Soup (After soaking a pint)
After soaking a pint of lentils in cold water for three or four hours, put them in a saucepan with 1 carrot, 1 onion, 2 ounces of salt pork cut in small pieces, a bunch of savory herbs with parsley. Season with a half tablespoon of salt and 6 peppercorns. Add the bones of any cold fowl or small game. Pour over 2 quarts of cold water and boil an hour, and rub through a sieve and return to the saucepan to get thoroughly heated. Cut some nice thin slices from the breast of the fowl or game used, put these in the soup tureen with a tablespoonful of butter, and pour the soup over them. Serve with croutons or sippets of fried bread.
A straightforward pureed lentil soup that leans on scraps — salt pork, poultry bones, a few slices of cold breast meat — for its depth. Nothing here needs rescuing, but several of the instructions assume a kitchen without a blender.
- The sieve is the whole pointRubbing the cooked lentils through a sieve is what gives this soup its texture; without it you have stewed lentils in broth. A blender or food mill does the same work in a fraction of the time, though a fine sieve afterwards still catches skins and gives a smoother result.
- Remove the bones firstPull out the poultry bones, the herb bundle and the peppercorns before pureeing. The original assumes this because bones will not go through a sieve; a blender will not be so forgiving.
- A pint of lentilsAbout 2 cups dry, roughly 14 oz, which with 2 quarts of water gives a thick soup once sieved. Brown or green lentils hold up best; red lentils collapse and need no soaking at all.
- Soaking is optional nowThree or four hours was insurance against old, hard-dried pulses. Modern lentils will usually cook through unsoaked in well under an hour, so the soak is better treated as a way to shorten the boil than as a requirement.
- Salt porkTwo ounces of salt pork is a seasoning, not a meat course. Unsmoked bacon or pancetta substitutes directly; if you use smoked bacon, expect the smoke to dominate. Taste before adding the half tablespoon of salt, as the pork and any leftover fowl carry their own.
- Savory herbsThis means a small tied bundle of aromatic herbs: thyme, a bay leaf, parsley stems, and sometimes the herb savory. Tie it or bag it so it comes out cleanly.
- SippetsSippets are small triangles or fingers of bread, toasted or fried in butter or fat; the recipe offers them as an alternative to croutons. Fry them while the sieved soup reheats and add them at the table so they stay crisp.
- YieldA pint of lentils in 2 quarts of water will serve six or so as a first course, though the recipe gives no yield. The tablespoon of butter goes into the tureen cold, not the pan -- it melts as the hot soup is poured over the sliced meat.
The phrase "soups without meat" as cookbooks of this period used it appears to have meant a soup not built on a stock-pot joint or a fresh cut of butcher's meat, rather than a soup free of animal food: salt pork, a bone or two and the picked breast of yesterday's fowl counted as kitchen economy. Lentils long carried a reputation as a poor man's food in Britain and America, which may be part of why English-language cookbooks of the period so often present them dressed up -- sieved smooth, enriched with butter, garnished with fried bread and a few slices of game -- in the manner of a French puree. Pressing a cooked pulse through a sieve to make a thick soup is the same technique behind the dishes labelled puree Esau or puree de lentilles in the professional French repertoire.