No. 719

Puree of Lentils with Cream

Puree de Lentilles a la Creme

Pick over and wash a pound and a half of lentils; place them in a saucepan with one quart of broth (No. 194a), a bunch of parsley garnished with thyme and bay leaf, two ounces of blanched salt pork, one onion with a clove in it, and a few sliced carrots; when done, remove the pork, parsley, and carrots, and drain the lentils; pound them in a mortar, season with salt and nutmeg, and dilute the pulp with a gill of bechamel (No. 409) and cream, and add an ounce of butter when ready to serve.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A classical French vegetable purée from Ranhofer's Delmonico's kitchen, written for cooks who already had stock and bechamel standing by. The whole point is smoothness, so the sieving step matters more than anything else.

Push it through a sievePounding in a mortar leaves skins behind, and skins are what make a lentil purée gritty. Ranhofer's text here calls only for pounding, but a food processor or blender gets you close, and passing the result through a drum sieve or fine chinois will give the smoothness the dish is after.
A gillHalf a cup, or four fluid ounces. The instruction reads as a gill of bechamel plus cream to loosen; start with the half cup of sauce and add cream by the spoonful until it mounds on a spoon rather than runs.
The broth will not be enoughA pound and a half of lentils will drink more than a quart. Keep more broth hot and top up as they cook; the original assumes a cook watching the pan, not a fixed ratio. No. 194a is one of Ranhofer's broths, and any good unsalted stock stands in.
Which lentilsSmall green lentils of the Puy or French type hold together during the long simmer with aromatics and give the cleanest flavour. Red or split lentils collapse into mush early and will not need the sieve, but they lose the earthiness the dish is built on.
Cooking timeThirty to forty-five minutes at a bare simmer, until a lentil crushes with no resistance. Undercooked lentils will never sieve smoothly no matter how long you pound them. Add salt only near the end, since the salt pork is already seasoning the pot.
Salt pork, blanchedTwo ounces of salt pork dropped into boiling water for a few minutes to draw out excess salt, then added to the pot. Unsmoked pancetta or a piece of unsmoked bacon does the same job; smoked bacon will dominate.
BechamelRanhofer's No. 409 is a standard milk-based white sauce, cooked out so it does not taste of flour. About half a cup of any well-made bechamel serves here. Its role is body, not flavour.
Finishing butterThe ounce of butter goes in off the heat, whisked in just before the purée leaves the kitchen. Added early it separates during holding; added at the end it gives the gloss.
YieldA pound and a half of dry lentils makes a great deal of purée, likely enough as a garnish for a dozen. Halve the recipe for a domestic table.

A Little History

This comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium of the cooking he ran at Delmonico's in New York, and it sits in the garnishings section rather than among the soups or vegetables — probably because, in the classical French service Ranhofer trained in, a stiff vegetable purée was an element placed on the plate beside a roast or a braise, spooned or piped, not a dish in its own right. Lentils are among the oldest cultivated foods in the Near East and Mediterranean, and the small green ones of the Auvergne were locally renowned, though the wider trade in them came later. The construction here is thoroughly of its period: the vegetable cooked with a garni of parsley, thyme and bay, an onion pricked with a clove, and a scrap of pork for depth, then everything aromatic discarded and the pulp enriched with bechamel, cream and butter. Nothing of the aromatics survives on the plate except what they left in the lentils, which is the sort of expenditure only a professional brigade could justify.