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Lentils
Soak over night and cook in boiling water until tender. Mash, season with salt, pepper and butter, and serve; or make in balls and sauté in butter.
A two-line entry that assumes the cook already knows what lentils are for. The technique is sound; only the soaking and the seasoning need comment.
- Skip the overnight soakSplit red lentils cook through in roughly 15-25 minutes from dry, brown lentils in about 20-30, and whole green or Puy lentils in about 25-40 depending on age. Lentils, unlike larger pulses, do not need soaking, and a long soak tends to leave them mushy.
- Salt at the endThe instruction to season after cooking is worth keeping, though the old belief that salted water toughens the skins is disputed; salting during cooking does little harm.
- Rinse and sortEarly-1900s pulses were sold loose and routinely carried small stones. Bagged lentils today still benefit from a quick pick-over and a rinse, but the step takes seconds rather than minutes.
- "Until tender" means collapsingBecause the lentils are to be mashed, cook them past the point you would want for a salad. Brown lentils at 40 minutes will break down under a fork without further help.
- Drain well for the ballsThe hinge of the second method. Wet mash will not hold a shape and will spit in the pan; drain the cooked lentils thoroughly, mash, and let the puree cool and stiffen before forming. Dry breadcrumb or a beaten egg is a common binder in comparable recipes, though this one calls for neither.
- Sauté heatButter alone browns fast. Medium heat, or butter cut with a neutral oil, gives the balls time to crust without the milk solids burning.
- QuantitiesNone are given. Reckon one cup of dry lentils to about three cups of water, yielding roughly two and a half cups cooked - four side servings mashed, or eight to ten small sautéed balls.
Lentils appear in American cookbooks of this period largely as a meat substitute, championed by vegetarian and health-reform writers and by cooks feeding a household cheaply through Lent or a lean week. The mashed-and-fried treatment here is a direct cousin of the lentil cutlets and rissoles that fill contemporary vegetarian manuals, where a pulse pur"e bound and browned in a pan stood in for a chop. Lowney's Cook Book was issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and alongside its confectionery chapters it carried a full general cookery section - hence a vegetable entry this terse, written for a reader assumed to know the basics.