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Lentils
1 cup lentils 1 tablespoon butter 1 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper Wash one cup of lentils, cover with cold water and soak over night. In the morning drain and cook in boiling water one hour, or until tender. Season with butter, salt and pepper.
A plain boiled-lentil recipe of the sort that filled out a household dinner cheaply. A few points bring it in line with what is on the shelf now.
- Which lentilThis almost certainly meant a brown or green whole lentil, which holds its shape. Split red lentils will collapse into puree in far less time and are not a substitute here.
- Skip the overnight soakLentils are not dried beans and do not need soaking; modern lentils cook through in 20 to 30 minutes from dry. The instruction may reflect older stock that had sat longer in storage.
- One hour is too longCheck at 20 minutes and taste every five after that. An hour on brown lentils gives you a mush, which may be what the original cook wanted but is not what the recipe says.
- Salt timingThe recipe salts at the end. Salting the cooking water instead seasons the lentils through and does not meaningfully slow them; acid, not salt, is what keeps skins firm and should be added only after they are tender.
- Rinse and sortWashing mattered more than it does now. Still tip the lentils into a bowl and look for small stones and grit, which can survive commercial cleaning.
- YieldOne cup of dry lentils gives about two and a half cups cooked, enough as a side for four. One tablespoon of butter is modest for that quantity; two is closer to modern taste.
Lentils were not a fashionable vegetable in an American cookbook of this era, appearing mainly on the strength of their protein and their price. Lentils are one of the oldest cultivated foods in the Near East and Mediterranean, and in the early twentieth century they are often said to have come to American kitchens largely through German, Central European and Middle Eastern immigrant cooking rather than through Anglo-American tradition; the bare treatment here, boiled and buttered with nothing else, suggests a writer setting down an unfamiliar ingredient in the simplest possible terms.