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Lentil Soup
1 cup lentils 1 carrot 1 stalk celery 1 onion 4 cups stock 3 tablespoons flour 2 tablespoons butter 2 teaspoons salt Soak lentils in water several hours; then drain and add the onions, carrot and celery, cut fine. Add water and boil ten minutes; place in cooker seven hours. Remove from cooker; drain and rub through sieve. Make paste of butter and flour; add vegetables, stock and seasoning. Heat and serve. For Cream Lentil Soup add milk instead of stock.
A fireless-cooker recipe, meaning the pot was brought to a boil on the stove and then sealed into an insulated box to finish on stored heat. The method translates directly to a slow cooker or a heavy covered pot, with one adjustment that matters for safety.
- The fireless cookerA wooden or metal chest packed with hay, felt or similar insulation, often with heated soapstone or metal discs added as radiators; food went in boiling hot and coasted down over hours. Its weakness is that the temperature falls steadily, so the later part of a seven-hour hold can drop below 140F, where spore-forming bacteria in cooked pulses and rice multiply. Use a slow cooker on low, which holds around 190-200F, or simmer covered on the stove.
- Actual cooking timeSoaked lentils need 20-30 minutes at a simmer, not seven hours. Unsoaked brown or green lentils take 35-45 minutes. The long hold was a fuel-saving device, not a requirement of the legume.
- Water versus stockThe instructions are compressed: the vegetables and lentils are cooked in plain water, and the 4 cups of stock go in at the end with the roux. If you cook them in the stock instead, reduce the finished seasoning accordingly.
- Rubbing through a sieveThis is the period route to a smooth puree. A blender or stick blender does it in seconds, and there is no reason to discard the vegetable solids as "drain and rub through sieve" implies -- push everything through, or blend, and thin with the cooking liquid.
- The roux2 tablespoons butter to 3 tablespoons flour is a stiff paste; cook it a minute or two before adding liquid so the soup does not taste of raw flour, and whisk the hot stock in gradually. With lentil puree already thickening the pot, you may want half this amount.
- Salt2 teaspoons is a lot against 4 cups of stock, particularly commercial stock. Start with half and correct at the end.
- Cream versionSubstituting milk for the stock gives a much blander soup; keep it below a simmer once the milk is in, and season more assertively -- a little onion, bay or nutmeg.
- The stray lines at the end"3 pounds lean beef, 2 quarts cold water, a little celery, 1/2 small onion" appears to be the beginning of the next recipe -- a beef stock or beef tea -- rather than part of this soup; the transcription has run one recipe into the next.
- YieldAbout 6 cups finished soup, or four servings as a first course.
Fireless cookery had a genuine vogue in American and British households from roughly 1900 into the 1920s, and cookbooks of the period regularly carried a chapter of it. The principle is old and is usually traced to the Scandinavian hay box, in which a boiling pot was buried in insulation to finish cooking without further fuel; it appealed to a generation still managing coal and wood ranges in hot kitchens, and it was promoted during the First World War as a fuel economy. Lentils suited the method: cheap, durable, meatless on a fast day, and forgiving of long slow heat. Sieved pulse soups thickened with a butter-and-flour paste of this kind belong to the same era's cooking-school style, in which a roux was a common finish for vegetable purees, and the offer of milk in place of stock reflects a household that would have kept both on hand.