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Lentils, Fried
Wash and soak over night a pint of lentils.
In the morning drain, cover them with warm water in which has been placed one-half teaspoon of soda, and bring them quickly to a boil. Boil gently for one hour, drain, cover them again with fresh boiling soft water, and boil gently until tender, this generally requiring one and one-half hour longer. Test by mashing a lentil now and then; if it crushes quickly, they are done, and should be
A three-hour lentil boil made sense when lentils were sold from an open sack and might be several years old. Modern lentils are a different proposition, and the recipe's text breaks off just before the frying, which is the part the title promises.
- The soda is the thing to skipHalf a teaspoon of baking soda in the cooking water softens skins fast, but it also turns the lentils to grey mush, gives a faint soapy taste, and destroys much of the thiamine. Old, hard, long-stored pulses needed the help; current stock does not.
- Cooking time is wildly overstated nowTwo and a half hours of gentle boiling will reduce today's brown or green lentils to purée. Reckon on 20 to 30 minutes from dry, unsoaked, for lentils that hold their shape enough to fry; red split lentils collapse in about 15 and are the wrong choice here.
- Skip the overnight soakLentils have thin seed coats and no need of it. Soaking modern lentils overnight, then boiling as directed, guarantees a paste.
- "Soft water"Water low in dissolved calcium and magnesium, which were understood to toughen pulse skins. Hard tap water does slow things slightly. Cooks have long been told to add salt only at the end rather than the start, though the evidence that early salting toughens pulses is weak.
- A pint of lentilsMeasured by volume, not weight: about 2 cups dry, roughly 14 oz, yielding some 5 to 6 cups cooked. Enough for six as a vegetable dish.
- The missing endingThe page cuts off mid-sentence. The usual finish for a dish of this name is to drain the tender lentils thoroughly, season them, and fry them in butter or drippings until browned, sometimes with onion, sometimes bound and shaped into cakes, though this book's own wording is lost. Drain them very dry before they meet hot fat or they will steam rather than brown.
- Two pots, one purposeThe instruction to boil an hour, drain, and start again with fresh water is not explained in the text; changing the water was commonly recommended in this period against the indigestibility blamed on pulses. It also throws away flavour. A single pot of unsalted water is standard practice now.
The Butterick Publishing Company sold dress patterns, and its cook book was aimed at the same middle-class household that bought The Delineator — practical, economical, faintly instructive. Lentils appear in American books of the 1890s largely as an economy protein and a health food: they were championed by vegetarian and hygienic-cookery writers, and were probably familiar to cooks through German and Jewish immigrant kitchens rather than through any Anglo-American tradition. The elaborate treatment here — overnight soak, soda, two changes of water, hours of boiling — may reflect both the hardness of long-stored imported pulses and what seems to have been a period conviction that legumes were difficult to digest and had to be tamed before they were fit to eat. Frying the boiled lentils in fat was the usual way of preparing them, plausibly to make an unfamiliar and rather plain ingredient palatable to a family that would have preferred meat.