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Lentil Soup
2 CUPS LENTILS SOAKED OVERNIGHT I 11/2 POUNDS SOUP MEAT I TEASPOON SALT I SLICED ONION Boil everything together 2-3 hours; when meat is tender take it out, press soup through sieve, reheat and season to taste. 1/2 QUARTS MILK I CAN CORN
A plain camp or range-top soup of the kind cooked in one pot over a fire. The ingredient list gives no liquid measure, so the cook is expected to judge it.
- The missing liquidNo water quantity is given. Cover the lentils and meat generously and top up as it reduces over the long boil.
- "Soup meat"This means cheap collagen-rich beef sold for stock: shin, shank, neck or a meaty marrow bone. A 1 1/2 lb bone-in shin or short rib does the same job.
- SoakingOlder recipes commonly call for lentils to be soaked overnight. Modern brown or green lentils do not need it and will cook in 30-40 minutes; the long boil here is timed to the meat, not the pulses.
- Boil versus simmerA hard boil for two hours will shred the meat and cloud the soup. Bring it up, then hold it at a bare simmer until the meat gives to a fork.
- SievingPressing through a sieve was the usual way to get a smooth purée before blenders. A stick blender does it in a minute; either way, pull the meat and any bone out first.
- SaltOne teaspoon for this volume is a starting point only, which is why the recipe says to season again at the end. Salt after sieving, when you can taste the finished consistency.
- ServingThe recipe gives no yield. The meat is taken out before sieving; it can be diced and returned to the pot or served separately.
Lentil soup with a piece of cheap boiling beef is a very old European dish, and it survives in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American cookbooks in almost this exact form: a pulse, a bone, an onion, salt, and hours of low heat. Dried lentils keep well without refrigeration, weigh little for the number of meals they yield, and forgive a fire whose temperature cannot be controlled precisely, which is why they turn up in camp, trail and military cookery well after fresher soups became easy at home. The sieving step is the most old-fashioned thing in it; a smooth pur u meant somebody had spent real effort with a wooden spoon and a mesh.