Semolina Soup
1 1/2 pints lentil stock 1 1/2 ounces semolina Salt Put the stock into a saucepan; when boiling, sprinkle in the semolina. Cook for twenty minutes. Season and serve.
A two-ingredient soup that lives or dies on the stock and on how the semolina goes in. Both are worth a moment's attention.
- The measurementsIf the pints are imperial, 1 1/2 pints is 30 fl oz, roughly 850 ml or about 3 1/2 US cups. The 1 1/2 ounces of semolina is a little over 40 g, roughly 4 tablespoons.
- Lentil stockThe liquid from cooking or straining lentils, likely saved from an earlier dish, though such stocks were also made on purpose. If you have none, simmer 100 g of brown or red lentils with an onion, a carrot, a bay leaf and 1.2 litres of water for 40 minutes and strain, pressing the solids; the pulp can go into something else.
- The hinge: sprinklingSemolina clumps the instant it hits liquid in a mass. Pour it in a thin stream from your fingers into fast-moving stock while whisking, and keep whisking for the first minute. A lump formed here will not break up later.
- Which semolinaUse plain durum wheat semolina, the fine or medium grind sold for puddings and gnocchi alla romana, not semolina flour and not the coarse couscous-grade grain. Fine semolina will be done nearer 15 minutes than 20.
- Twenty minutes, and stirringThe long cook is right, since semolina keeps swelling and the raw starchy taste needs time to go. Stir every few minutes and keep the heat low once it thickens, or it will catch on the bottom of the pan.
- ConsistencyThis sets up as it cools and will be noticeably thicker by the time it reaches the table. Hold back a little stock and slacken it at the end if it has gone past a pourable soup.
- SeasoningSalt is all the book gives, and lentil stock is usually flat without a good deal of it. Black pepper, a scrape of nutmeg or a spoonful of lemon juice at the end all lift it; so does a knob of butter stirred in off the heat.
- YieldTwo generous or three modest servings as a first course.
Meatless Cookery is often placed in a run of books shaped by wartime and interwar shortages and by vegetarian household economy, though the attribution is uncertain, and this recipe shows the thrift plainly: the stock is a by-product of yesterday's lentils, and a little semolina turns it into a course. Semolina, the coarse middlings left when durum wheat is milled, was a fixture of the British larder mainly as a milk pudding, but it had long served on the Continent as a soup thickener and dumpling base, from Austrian Griessnockerlsuppe to Italian semolina gnocchi. Thickening a thin broth with a cereal rather than with a flour-and-butter roux is the older and cheaper method, and it keeps the soup free of the dairy and meat fat that a period white soup would have relied on emoved removepence price and softened the confident British/wartime framing to an uncertain attribution." }