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Cream of Lentil Soup
1 cup dry lentils 3 cups water 3 tablespoons flour 3 tablespoons butter 2 cups milk 2 teaspoons salt Soak the lentils for several hours in three cups of water Cook two to three hours. When tender, rub through the colander, and, if necessary, add hot water sufficient to make one pint of puree. Make a white sauce of the butter, flour and milk, and add gradually to the lentil puree, reheat, salt and serve. This makes one quart.
A straightforward purée soup from the meatless-cookery tradition: lentils cooked soft, sieved, and let down with a white sauce. Two details need updating — the cooking time and the sieving.
- Cooking timeTwo to three hours is far longer than modern lentils need. Modern brown or green lentils, soaked or not, are tender in 25–40 minutes; red lentils collapse in about 20. Check at 25 minutes and add water as needed.
- SoakingNot necessary with current lentils, and the recipe does not depend on it. If you skip it, start with the same 3 cups of water and top up during simmering.
- Rubbing through the colanderThis is the step that makes it "cream of" — it removes the skins and gives a smooth purée. A food mill or a fine sieve does the same job; a blender purées the skins in rather than out, which is acceptable but coarser.
- The pint of puréeAfter sieving you want exactly 2 cups of lentil purée, thinned with hot water if it is thicker. Get this right and the finished soup lands at the stated quart; guess at it and the white sauce will either be lost or leave the soup pasty.
- White sauce proportionsThree tablespoons each of butter and flour to 2 cups milk sits between a thin and a medium sauce (the standard medium proportion is 2 tablespoons of each per cup of milk). Cook the roux a minute or two before adding milk so the soup does not taste of raw flour, and add the sauce to the purée gradually, off a hard boil, to avoid lumps.
- SaltTwo teaspoons for a quart is on the high side by current palates, particularly since the lentils are cooked unsalted. Add half, taste, and adjust.
- YieldOne quart, as stated — four modest first-course servings, or two as a main with bread.
Meatless cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — many of them produced within vegetarian, Seventh-day Adventist and health-reform circles, others simply for Lent and fast days — leaned heavily on legumes as the protein that replaced the joint of meat. Lentils were prized in that literature for being cheap, storable and, in the nutritional language of the day, "nitrogenous." The technique here is standard American cookery of the period: any vegetable could be boiled, sieved and bound with a butter-flour-milk sauce to become a "cream of" soup, a formula codified in the cooking-school textbooks that dominated household teaching from the 1890s onward.