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Baked Lentils
1 pint lentils 1 pint water 3 ounces salt pork 1/2 small onion 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper Pick and wash the lentils and soak them in cold water over night. In the morning put them over the fire in a large saucepan with about a quart of water. As soon as the water begins to boil the lentils will rise to the top. Remove them with a skimmer; put them in a deep baking dish with the pork and onion in the center, and pour over them the pint of boiling water, in which the salt and pepper have been mixed. Bake in a moderate oven four or five hours. The lentils must be kept moist and it may be necessary to add a little water from time to time. 1 pint dried beans 1/4 pound salt pork 1 cup water
A baked-bean method applied to lentils, from the era when a long slow oven was cheap because the range was already lit. The timing is the main thing a modern cook needs to reconsider.
- The four-to-five hour bakeLentils are not navy beans; soaked lentils are tender in 30 to 45 minutes and will collapse into a puree long before hour four. The long bake here is borrowed wholesale from baked beans. Treat 1 to 1.5 hours at 350F as the outside limit if you want the lentils to hold their shape, and check for moisture every 20 minutes.
- A moderate ovenConventionally read as about 350F. If you do want the slow-melting, bean-pot texture the original implies, a lower oven around 300F in a covered dish will be gentler.
- Pint of lentilsA pint measure is 2 cups, about 13 to 14 ounces of dried lentils. That yields roughly 5 cups cooked, enough for four to six as a main dish.
- Overnight soakModern split lentils and small green lentils do not need it, and a long soak can leave them mushy. Whole brown or green lentils tolerate a soak but gain little; skip it and allow a little extra simmering time instead.
- The skimming stepWhat rises to the top of the boiling water is loose skins and foam along with the lentils. Draining through a colander does the same job. Reserve the cooking liquid rather than the plain pint of boiling water if you want more flavor.
- Salt porkThree ounces of salt-cured pork, usually fatback or fatty belly, still sold in slabs near the bacon. Rinse it, and if it has rind, cut a cross-hatch so the fat renders. Unsmoked streaky bacon or pancetta substitutes cleanly; if you leave it out, the half teaspoon of salt is not enough on its own.
- Keeping it moistThe dish should be covered for most of the bake, uncovered for the last 15 minutes to brown the pork and the surface. Add boiling, not cold, water when it dries out.
- The stray last lineThe final "1 pint dried beans, 1/4 pound salt pork, 1 cup water" appears to belong to a neighboring recipe and has been carried over in transcription; it is not part of the lentil method.
Lentils turn up in American cookbooks of this period often under headings like "Meat Substitutes" — a category that owed as much to household economy and to the vegetarian currents of the late nineteenth century as to any wartime shortage, though the First World War gave such chapters new urgency. The technique here is pure New England bean pot: soak, parboil, bury a piece of salt pork in the middle, and leave it in a slow oven for the better part of a day. That the same formula was applied to a legume that needs a fraction of the time tells you the recipe was built from a template rather than from tasting.