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Curried Vegetables (Overnight Drain cover)
overnight. Drain, cover with fresh warm water, and simmer for half an hour. Bring to boiling point. Again drain, again cover with hot water, and simmer until the lentils are tender.
They are ready when they mash easily between the fingers. Melt the butter in a casserole; add the onion and red peppers chopped fine. Stir and cook until the butter is browned. Add the tomatoes, canned or raw, salt and pepper to taste. Drain the lentils and add them. Cook for half an hour without the cover.
The page begins mid-sentence — the ingredient list and the first line (lentils covered with cold water to soak overnight) are on the preceding leaf. What survives is workable, but a few things need translating.
- What is missingThe surviving text names butter, onion, red peppers, tomatoes, salt, pepper and lentils, but no curry powder, despite the title. Assume 1 to 2 teaspoons of curry powder stirred into the butter with the onion; the quantities of everything else are guesswork, so work from about 1 cup dried lentils, 1 large onion, 2 sweet red peppers, 2 cups tomatoes and 2 tablespoons butter.
- The three drainingsSoaking overnight and then twice discarding the cooking water was a common recommendation for older, longer-stored pulses. Modern split or brown lentils need no soak at all and cook tender in 20 to 30 minutes in one pot of water. Repeating the original procedure throws away flavour and water-soluble minerals.
- "Ready when they mash easily"This is the correct test and worth keeping. Undercooked lentils will soften only very slowly once the tomatoes go in, since acid slows their breakdown.
- Browned butter"Cook until the butter is browned" means the milk solids have gone nut-brown, not black. With chopped onion in the pan this takes 8 to 10 minutes over medium heat and is where most of the dish's depth comes from. If curry powder is used, add it at the point the butter takes colour and give it 30 seconds before the tomatoes.
- "Red peppers"Chopped fine and cooked with the onion, so most likely sweet red peppers rather than chilli; note that 'red pepper' in period cookery could also mean cayenne. If you want heat, add it deliberately.
- The casseroleThis book means a flameproof earthenware or enamelled vessel used on direct heat as well as in the oven. Any heavy saucepan or Dutch oven does the same job; a modern glazed baking dish will crack on a burner.
- The final half hourUncovered, so the tomato reduces and the mixture thickens. Stir now and then — lentils settle and scorch. If it tightens too far, loosen with a little of the lentil cooking liquid.
- YieldOn the assumed quantities above, about four servings as a main dish with rice, six as a side.
Casserole cookery had a vogue in Britain and America in the years either side of 1910, promoted in a run of small single-subject books: the earthenware pot was cheap, went from fire to table, and suited the long gentle cooking that made inexpensive cuts and dried pulses palatable. Curried vegetables belong to the same economy. Curry powder — a British commercial blend, sold ready-mixed since the late eighteenth century and by this period a pantry staple rather than an exotic — was one way of making meatless food taste of something, and lentils were cheap and shelf-stable. The triple-drain instruction here may reflect the state of the dried goods trade at the time, when pulses reached the kitchen loose from a sack and were often old, dirty and slow to soften.