Home › Soups › Puree of Lentils
Puree of Lentils
3 pts. of lentils 2 qts. broth 4 oz. salt pork 2 tablespoons Gold Medal flour 2 leeks 1 small onion 1 sprig of parsley 1 teaspoon sugar 2 teaspoons salt Wash and pick over the lentils and soak over night in cold water. In the morning drain. Put in kettle with cold water to cover, add vegetables and salt pork. Boil until the beans fall to pieces. As the water evaporates, add broth. When tender, rub all through a puree. Remove fat, thicken with Gold Medal flour cooked in butter, add sugar and salt, cook for five minutes and serve.
A classic French-style purée soup scaled for a large household. The proportions are generous and the method assumes a sieve rather than a blender.
- Three pints of lentils is a lotLentils were measured by volume, so 3 pints is roughly 6 cups dry, about 2 1/2 lb, which swells to a pot that will feed 12 to 16. Halving or quartering the recipe is reasonable for a modern household; keep the broth at about 1 1/3 cups per cup of dry lentils, adding more as it cooks down.
- Soaking is optional nowOvernight soaking suited the older, drier, longer-stored lentils of the period. Modern brown or green lentils cook to collapse in 35 to 50 minutes unsoaked; red lentils in 20. Soaked lentils will simply fall apart faster.
- "Rub all through a puree"Almost certainly shorthand for rubbing the cooked solids through a puree sieve or conical strainer rather than a direction to make a puree in the abstract. A food mill gives the same texture. A blender or immersion blender works but produces a smoother, slightly gluier body, so thin with extra broth.
- Salt porkFour ounces of salt pork is a cured fatty side pork, still sold at many butchers. Thick-cut bacon or pancetta substitutes, though both are smokier. Blanch salt pork briefly if it is very salty, and hold back on the 2 teaspoons of added salt until the end.
- The roux"Thicken with flour cooked in butter" means a white roux: 2 tablespoons flour cooked in an equal weight of butter until it smells nutty but stays pale, then whisked into the hot purée. The five-minute simmer afterward is not optional, it is what cooks out the raw flour taste.
- Removing the fatSkim after puréeing, while the soup is still hot and the rendered pork fat has risen. Chilling the soup and lifting the solid cap is easier if you are making it ahead.
- BrothThe recipe specifies only 'broth', i.e. household stock of whatever kind was on hand. Any unsalted or lightly salted stock works; with a strongly salted commercial broth, drop the added salt to a pinch and correct at the end.
- The teaspoon of sugarA very small amount for this quantity, so probably intended to round the earthy edge of the lentils rather than to sweeten. Leave it in even if the quantity looks odd.
Gold Medal Flour cookbooks were promotional volumes issued by the Washburn-Crosby Company of Minneapolis, the milling firm that later became General Mills, and like most brand cookbooks they name the product in the ingredient list wherever it appears, which is why two tablespoons of flour in a lentil soup earn a trademark. The dish itself is straightforwardly French: puree de lentilles was a fixture of nineteenth-century soup repertoires, built on the same logic as puree of peas or beans, a pulse simmered to collapse, forced through a sieve, and finished with a roux for body and gloss. Lentils reached American tables largely through European cookbooks and immigrant kitchens rather than domestic farming; lentils are usually said to have been introduced to the Palouse region of Washington and Idaho around 1916, with commercial production expanding in the decades after, and the Palouse long supplied the bulk of the domestic crop.