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Lentils and Bacon
Wash the lentils, put them into a saucepan with plenty of cold water, a bay leaf and a blade of mace tied together, an onion stuck with three or four cloves and boil gently until soft, adding more boiling water now and then; when cooked, drain the lentils. Peel and slice an onion, put it in a stewpan with a lump of butter and fry; when nicely browned, put in one-fourth pound of fat bacon cut into small squares, and when cooked, put in the lentils. Moisten with a little clear stock, season to taste with pepper and salt and add some finely-chopped parsley. Boil all gently by the side of the fire for a few minutes, then turn onto a hot dish, and serve with sippets of toast, or small croutons of fried bread.
The method is sound and needs almost no translation; what it lacks is quantities. The only fixed measure is a quarter pound of bacon, which is proportioned to roughly a pound of dry lentils.
- QuantitiesFigure 1 lb (about 2¼ cups) dry lentils to the ¼ lb bacon and two onions, one for the cooking water and one sliced and fried. That yields six generous portions as a side, four as a supper dish.
- Which lentilUse brown or green lentils, or French green (Puy) if you want them to hold their shape. Red and yellow split lentils collapse into purée and will not survive the final frying stage.
- Cooking timeModern brown or green lentils simmer soft in 20 to 30 minutes; older, drier stock would take longer, which may be why the recipe leaves the time open. Start checking at 20 and stop while they still have a little bite, since they get a second brief cooking in the bacon fat.
- Blade of maceMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg, and a "blade" is one piece of it. Whole blades are sold by spice merchants; if you substitute ground mace, use a scant ¼ teaspoon and add it with the stock rather than the boiling water, where it would simply cloud and disappear.
- Fat baconThis means fatty streaky bacon or salt pork, cut into lardons, not thin breakfast rashers. Heavily smoked supermarket bacon will dominate the mace and cloves; if it is all you have, use a little less.
- "By the side of the fire"The side, away from the fiercest heat, was the low-heat position. Translate as the lowest burner setting, just enough to keep things moving for three or four minutes while the lentils take up the stock.
- SippetsSippets are small triangles or fingers of toast, traditionally arranged around the edge of the dish. Croutons of bread fried in butter or in the bacon fat do the same job.
- SeasoningSalt at the end, as written, not because salt toughens lentils — it does not — but because the bacon and the stock both carry salt and the total is unpredictable until they are in the pan.
Lentils with bacon is a plain dish of the German and Alsatian kitchen — Linsen mit Speck — and its presence in The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf is a reminder of who was cooking in American luxury hotels around 1896. Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel whose name the book carries, was assembling a working reference rather than a menu of showpieces, and it runs from terrapin and canvasback duck to pulses boiled with an onion stuck with cloves. The onion studded with cloves and the herbs tied in a bundle are both French service-kitchen habits, meant to flavor a pot and then be lifted out whole; the mace, more common in Victorian cooking than in ours, appears here in that older register of warm spicing. Lentils themselves were among the cheapest things in the storeroom, which is why this appears as a hearty accompaniment rather than a course in its own right.