Lentil Soup
INGREDIENTS for soup for 4 persons.-1 pint of green German lentils, 2 oz. of butter, 1½ pint of the liquor in which a joint of pork has been boiled, 2 or 3 cloves of garlic, pepper and salt. AVERAGE COST, 8d.
Boil the lentils in a lined saucepan for 15 minutes, then pour off the water, add a small quantity of fresh with the butter and seasoning and simmer till quite soft. Stir in the liquor and add the garlic or some slices of fried onion.
TIME.-4 hours.
SEASONABLE in winter.
LETTUCES.
Lettuces. These form one of the principal ingredients to summer salads; they should be blanched and be eaten young.
They are seldom served in any other way, but may be stewed and sent to table in a good brown gravy flavoured with lemon-juice. In preparing them for a salad, carefully wash them free from dirt, pick off all the decayed and outer leaves and dry them thoroughly cloth.
LETTUCE. by shaking them in a 224 LIVER AND PARSLEY SAUCE.
Cut off the stalks and either cut or tear the lettuces into small pieces. The manner of cutting them up entirely depends on the salad for which they are intended.
In France, the lettuces are sometimes merely wiped with a cloth and not washed, the cooks there declaring that the act of washing them injuriously affects the pleasant crispness of the plant: in this case scrupulous attention must be paid to each leaf, and the grit thoroughly wiped away.
SEASONABLE from March to the end of August, but may be had all the year.
A frugal winter soup built on pork stock and dried lentils. The recipe is workable as written, though a couple of the quantities and timings need translating.
- Lentils by volumeBeeton's pint is an imperial one (20 fl oz), so roughly 2½ cups of dried lentils, near enough a pound by weight. "Green German lentils" was the trade name for a small continental green lentil; any modern green or brown lentil will behave much the same.
- The two conflicting timesThe method says boil 15 minutes, drain, then simmer till soft; the footer says 4 hours. Modern green lentils need 25-40 minutes of simmering after the initial blanch, not hours. Cook to texture and ignore the total.
- Why the water is poured offThe recipe does not say. The first boil and drain discards the initial cooking water; with today's clean, fast-cooking lentils it can simply be skipped.
- Pork liquor1½ imperial pints (30 fl oz, about 850 ml) of the water a joint of pork was boiled in. Few households have that on hand now; unsalted ham or bacon stock, or chicken stock with a piece of smoked bacon simmered in it, is a reasonable stand-in. Taste before salting, as boiled-pork liquor is usually salty.
- Lined saucepanBeeton most likely means a tin-lined copper pan, so that the food did not sit against bare copper. Any modern stainless or enamelled pan is fine.
- Garlic or onionTwo or three cloves stirred in raw at the end will be sharp. Either simmer them in the soup for the last ten minutes, or take the alternative given and use slices of onion fried in the butter.
- Yield and finishFour portions, as stated. If you want more body, pass some of it through a blender and return it to the pan.
Lentil soup earned its place in Victorian cookery books as an economy dish: at eightpence for four people it was among the cheapest hot meals Beeton costed, and it made use of the liquor from a boiled joint of pork rather than throwing it away. The specification of "green German lentils" reflects the fact that Britain grew almost no pulses of this kind and imported them from central Europe, where lentil soup with smoked pork was, and remains, everyday cooking. The seasonal note is telling too: dried pulses kept through the winter when fresh vegetables did not, which is why a soup with no fresh produce in it at all is marked "seasonable in winter."