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Sautéd Lentils
1 pint lentils
2 tablespoons butter or savory
¼ teaspoon soda fat
Salt and pepper
Wash the lentils and soak overnight. In the morning, drain them, cover with warm water in which the soda has been dissolved, and bring them quickly to the boiling-point. Boil gently for one hour, drain, cover them again with fresh boiling water, and boil gently until tender; this generally requires about one and one-half to two hours longer. Test by mashing a lentil between the fingers. If it crushes quickly, they are done. Drain in a colander.
Place butter or fat in a frying-pan and when it is melted add the lentils, with salt and pepper to season; stir them over the fire for fifteen minutes. Two minced onions may be added to the lentils, if desired.
The method here assumes lentils that have sat in a sack for a year or more; modern lentils need a fraction of this treatment. The headline change is time.
- Cooking timeTwo and a half to three hours of boiling will reduce today's lentils to paste. Brown or green lentils cook from dry in 20-30 minutes, and split red lentils in about 15. Start testing early and use the recipe's own test: a lentil that crushes easily between the fingers is done.
- Skip the overnight soakLentils are thin enough that they need no soaking, unlike dried beans. Soaking a modern lentil overnight mainly costs you texture. A rinse and a pick-over for grit and stones is enough.
- The sodaA quarter teaspoon of baking soda in the cooking water raises the pH and softens stubborn skins, which mattered when pulses were old and the water hard. It also degrades thiamine and can leave a slippery, faintly soapy texture. Leave it out.
- The ingredient listIt reads as run-on but resolves to: 1 pint lentils, 2 tablespoons butter or savory fat, ¼ teaspoon soda, salt and pepper. "Savory fat" means bacon drippings, goose fat or similar - not the herb summer savory.
- A pint of lentilsMeasured dry by volume, that is 2 cups, roughly 14 oz or 400 g, which will swell to something over 5 cups cooked.
- Salt timingThe original salts only in the pan. Salting the cooking water gives better-seasoned lentils and, contrary to old kitchen lore, does not prevent them softening.
- The sautéFifteen minutes of stirring in butter is long for already-tender lentils. Five to eight minutes over medium heat is enough to drive off surface water and let the fat coat them; longer and they break down. If you add the two minced onions, soften them in the fat first, then fold the lentils in.
- YieldThe recipe states no yield. A pint of dry lentils will comfortably serve six as a side dish.
Lentils appear in American household books of this period as an economy protein rather than a fashionable vegetable - cheap, shelf-stable, and promoted by domestic-science writers as a legitimate substitute for meat at a time when nutrition was being taught in terms of grams of protein. The treatment here is deliberately plain: boil, drain, finish in fat. The long boiling and the pinch of soda reflect a supply chain in which dried pulses might be several seasons old by the time they reached the kitchen; soda in the pot was common advice for hard water and hard skins, and is still occasionally repeated, though the loss of B vitamins it causes has been recognised since about the middle of the twentieth century. The optional minced onion is the only concession to flavor beyond salt and pepper, a fair indication of how restrained Anglo-American cooking of pulses was before the Mediterranean and South Asian traditions became familiar to home cooks here.