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Cream of Lentils with Sorrel
Soak one pint lentils in cold water for four hours, then drain on sieve and place in saucepan with three quarts water, a sliced carrot, sliced onion, two each sliced leeks and branches celery, one branch chervil, one sliced, peeled, raw potato and half-pound piece raw lean salt pork. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, cover pan and let slowly boil for one and a half hours, remove pan from fire, take up pork and keep it for further use, and pour puree through a sieve into a basin. Remove the stalks and stale leaves from one and a half quarts fresh sorrel, wash well, drain, then cut in julienne-shaped strips, place in a large saucepan with an ounce butter and cook on the range until the moisture is nearly evaporated. Strain the soup through a Chinese strainer into the sorrel pan, mix well, boil for five minutes, then pour in one gill cream, mix well again, boil for five minutes longer, pour in a soup tureen and serve.
A classic French potage of lentils finished with sorrel and cream, written for a kitchen with a stockpot, a drum sieve and someone to push the puree through. Two things decide the result: the acidity of the sorrel against the cream, and not overcooking modern lentils.
- Sorrel and cream, in that orderSorrel is high in oxalic and other acids, and cream boiled in it for five minutes can break. Add the cream off the heat or at a bare simmer, and warm it through rather than boiling it as written.
- Lentil timingModern brown or green lentils cook in 30-45 minutes; the four-hour soak is unnecessary and 90 minutes of boiling will reduce them to mush. Simmer until they collapse easily under a spoon, then puree.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fluid ounces. A pint of lentils is about 2 cups dry, roughly 14 oz.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. A fine sieve works; a blender or stick blender first will save considerable pushing, with the chinois used only to catch skins.
- Salt porkBuy unsmoked salt pork and taste it before committing. Much of it is very heavily cured, and a half-pound piece in three quarts of soup can carry all the salt you need, so hold back the teaspoon of salt until the end. Blanching the pork for five minutes and discarding that water tames it.
- Sorrel quantityA quart and a half of loose leaves is only a few ounces trimmed, perhaps 3-5 oz, which cooks down to a few tablespoons. Sorrel turns olive-drab the moment it hits heat; this is normal and unavoidable, not a fault in the cooking.
- ChervilA "branch" is a sprig. If chervil is unavailable, a few parsley stems plus a pinch of tarragon approximate its anise note; it is a background flavor here, not a defining one.
- YieldThree quarts of water, less what the covered pan loses, gives enough finished soup to serve about eight as a first course. The recipe reserves the pork for unspecified 'further use' elsewhere in the kitchen.
Sorrel soups run through French cooking from the peasant kitchen to the grand hotel: the same leaf that flavors a farmhouse soupe à l'oseille also finishes the classic potage Germiny, thickened with egg yolks and cream. This version splices that finish onto a lentil puree built on the standard French aromatic base plus a piece of salt pork, the everyday fat and seasoning of continental soup-making before stock cubes. Sorrel was a common kitchen-garden green in Europe and in nineteenth-century American gardens, valued because its sharp acidity lifts starchy, heavy bases like lentils, dried peas or potato. It appears here in a book organized as a tour of the world's kitchens, with a professionally trained chef's French repertoire close at hand.