Lentil Puree
1/2 pound lentils Egyptian or German 1/4 pound Spanish onions 3 ounces carrots 2 sticks celery 1/2 ounce butter 1 quart cold water Pepper and salt 1/2 ounce flour 1/2 pint milk 1/4 pound turnips Wash the lentils, and soak all night in the water. Prepare the vegetables, and cut them up. Cook for five minutes in the butter, add the lentils, the water in which they were soaked and salt. Bring to boiling point, skim, and simmer for two hours. Rub through a hair-sieve. Return to the saucepan, and bring to the boiling point. Mix the flour smoothly with the milk, add it to the soup, and cook for ten minutes. Season and serve.
A classic purée soup, thickened at the end with a milk-and-flour liaison rather than cream. The proportions are sound; the timings and the sieve belong to another kitchen.
- Which lentil"Egyptian" means the small split red lentil, which collapses to purée in 20-25 minutes and needs no soaking at all. "German" is the brown or green whole lentil, which holds its shape and wants 45 minutes to an hour. Either works; with modern lentils the two-hour simmer is longer than the pulse itself requires.
- Weights in cupsHalf a pound of lentils is about 1 1/4 cups; 1/4 lb onion is a small onion, or roughly half a Spanish onion; 3 oz carrot is one medium; 1/4 lb turnip is one small. Half an ounce of butter is a tablespoon, and half an ounce of flour is a scant 2 tablespoons.
- The half-pint of milkIf the book is English, that is an imperial half-pint, 10 fl oz or 1 1/4 cups. If American, 8 fl oz. Start with a cup and add more to reach the consistency you want after sieving.
- Soak, and use the waterThe instruction to cook the lentils in their soaking water is deliberate — the soluble starch and flavour are in it. If you skip the soak with red lentils, use a full quart of fresh cold water.
- Sweat, don't brownFive minutes in butter is a sweat: the onion should go translucent, not take colour. Browning here pushes the finished purée toward a muddy, roasted flavour rather than the clean sweetness the recipe is after.
- Hair-sieveA fine horsehair sieve, pushed through with a wooden mushroom. A food mill on the fine plate gives the closest result; a blender or stick blender is faster but does not remove the skins, so pass it through a chinois afterwards if you want the original smoothness.
- The last ten minutesThe flour-and-milk slurry must cook out or the soup tastes of raw paste. Add it to soup that is at a bare simmer, whisking, and hold it there for the full ten minutes, stirring often, as a thickened purée can catch on the bottom.
- Seasoning and yieldSalt goes in at the start with the lentils and again at the end; pulses absorb a surprising amount. Makes roughly 1 1/2 quarts, serving four generously or six as a first course. A little lemon juice or vinegar at the table lifts it considerably.
Purée soups of this kind were a fixture of the professional and upper-middle-class English repertoire, where a lentil purée was sometimes listed on menus as purée Esaü, after the pottage for which Esau sold his birthright. The technique here — sweat the aromatics, simmer, pass through a hair sieve, finish with a milk liaison — is straight out of the codified soup-making of the period, applied to a cheap pulse rather than game or poultry. That is the point of a book called Meatless Cookery: such volumes multiplied in the early twentieth century, driven partly by the vegetarian movement, partly by Lenten and Friday cooking, and heavily by wartime meat scarcity, and their usual argument was that a dish need lose nothing in refinement by losing its meat. The Spanish onion and the choice between Egyptian and German lentils are a reminder that the pulse trade was already thoroughly international.