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Lentils with Onions
Pick the lentils over carefully and wash them well, put them in a saucepan with plenty of cold water and boil until tender. When soft turn the lentils onto a fine sieve and allow them to drain thoroughly. Peel and cut into thin slices a number of onions, put them into a flat stewpan with a lump of butter, and fry. Put the lentils in with the onions, season to taste with pepper and salt, moisten with a little clear stock, and allow them to simmer at the side of the fire for a few minutes. If the stock is not convenient moisten with the cooking water of the lentils. When ready, turn them onto a hot dish, and serve.
A plain vegetable dish that depends almost entirely on how far you cook the lentils and how far you cook the onions. Neither step is timed in the original.
- QuantitiesOscar gives none. For four as a side, figure about 1 1/2 cups (roughly 10 oz) dry lentils, 2 medium onions, 2 tablespoons butter, and 1/3 cup stock for moistening.
- Which lentilUse brown or green lentils, or French lentilles du Puy, which hold their shape. Red and yellow split lentils collapse into purée and will not survive the drain-and-fry step.
- "Boil until tender"Brown or green lentils take 20-30 minutes at a bare simmer; Puy lentils 25-35. Hard boiling splits the skins. Salt the cooking water lightly rather than leaving it entirely unseasoned — the old advice that salt toughens lentils does not hold up.
- Picking overNot a formality in 1896 and still worth two minutes now, since bagged lentils occasionally carry a small stone. Rinsing in a bowl also floats off any shrivelled ones.
- Save the cooking waterThe recipe treats it as the fallback for stock, so drain over a bowl, not the sink. It is starchy and lightly earthy and binds the finished dish better than water.
- The onions are the dishThe onions -- The text says only 'fry,' with no time or colour specified. Cooking them slowly to golden sweetness, 15-20 minutes over medium-low heat, rather than browning them quickly, gives the dish more flavour.
- "At the side of the fire"A cooler part of the range. On a modern hob it means the lowest setting; the recipe says only 'a few minutes,' long enough for the lentils to absorb the stock without turning to mush.
- ServingIntended as a hot vegetable course alongside roast or boiled meat. A squeeze of lemon or a spoon of vinegar at the end is not in the text but suits the dish, which is otherwise unrelieved.
Lentils sat awkwardly in the American gilded-age dining room: cheap, filling, and strongly associated with German, Central European and Jewish home cooking. Oscar Tschirky's book runs to hundreds of pages of consommés and a broad vegetable section like this one, written flat and without flourish, which reads as household guidance more than hotel practice. The onion-and-butter treatment is a plain domestic one, and the instruction to fall back on the lentil cooking water if stock is not to hand is a note of household economy. Lentils themselves are among the oldest cultivated foods in the Near East.