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Lentils
These are one of the most important of the leguminous seeds and are valuable for soups, stews and rice dishes in which there is a small allowance of nitrogenous elements. Wash and soak a pint of lentils over night, in the morning drain, cover with warm, soft water and bring quickly to a boiling point. Boil gently about one hour, drain and cover again with fresh, boiling, soft water. Boil gently until the lentils are tender, about another hour. Press them between the thumb and fingers, if they mash quickly under pressure they are done. Drain in a colander. Put two tablespoonfuls of butter in a saucepan, when melted add the lentils; add one tablespoonful of onion juice, a palatable seasoning of salt and pepper; stir over the fire about fifteen minutes and serve very hot. One or two tablespoonfuls of cream may also be added if liked.
The method here is built around lentils that had been sitting in a sack for a year or more. Modern lentils are fresher and cook in a fraction of the time, so the timings are the first thing to change.
- Two hours is far too longBrown or green lentils cook tender in 20 to 30 minutes from dry, red or split lentils in 15. Two separate hour-long boils will leave you with a pan of purée. Start testing at 20 minutes using the thumb-and-finger test the recipe describes, which is still the best gauge.
- Soaking is optionalLentils have thin seed coats and need no overnight soak. An hour's soak shortens cooking slightly; skipping it entirely costs you nothing. The change of water after the first boil may have been intended to deal with old, hard seed and to wash away some of the compounds in the skins that cause gassiness; it can be dropped.
- Soft waterThis means water low in dissolved calcium and magnesium; hard water genuinely slows the softening of pulse skins. If your tap water is very hard, use filtered or bottled water, or add a pinch of baking soda to the cooking water.
- A pint of lentilsMeasured dry, that is about 2 cups, roughly 14 oz, yielding some 4 to 5 cups cooked. Enough for six as a side dish, four as the base of a meal.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp in a sieve or a twist of cloth; one medium onion gives about a tablespoon. It contributes onion flavour without any texture.
- SaltAdd it in the finishing stage, as written. Whether salted cooking water slows the skins from softening is disputed; modern testing suggests any effect is small at most.
- The finishFifteen minutes of stirring cooked lentils in butter will break them down. Two or three minutes is enough to coat them and warm the seasoning through; add the cream at the very end and take the pan off the heat.
- "Nitrogenous elements"The period term for protein. The point being made is that lentils supply protein where a soup or rice dish has little meat, which is exactly why they are here.
Lentils are among the oldest cultivated foods, carried through the Near East and the Mediterranean long before written recipes, and they reached English and American cookbooks largely as a cheap protein rather than a delicacy. Books of this era, written when household science was becoming fashionable, tend to introduce them in nutritional language: the concern with "nitrogenous elements" reflects the period interest in food chemistry and in feeding families adequately at low cost. The double boiling and the overnight soak likely reflect a time when dried pulses were bought loose and stored for unknown periods, and stale lentils can refuse to soften almost indefinitely. The butter-and-cream finish reads as a concession to the table, enriching a plain boiled pulse to serve as a vegetable dish.