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Potage Lentils, Montagnarde
Soak one and a half pints lentils in cold water six hours at least; drain. Heat one ounce butter in a saucepan, add one finely sliced onion, four sliced leeks and half pound salt pork cut in small pieces; mix well and brown for ten minutes, stirring meanwhile; then add the drained lentils with four medium, peeled, sliced potatoes, two branches parsley, one branch chervil, one bean sound garlic, two bay leaves, two cloves and one and a half teaspoons crushed allspice; moisten with three quarts hot water, season with one teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper, mix well, cover pan and let boil for two hours. Remove, press through sieve into a basin, replace in same saucepan with half pint hot milk, one gill cream and a quarter ounce good butter; mix well, let boil ten minutes, strain through a Chinese strainer into a soup tureen, and serve with a plate of bread croutons separately.
A large-format French lentil purée — three quarts of liquid before the enrichment, so plan on a stockpot and a crowd. A few of the measures and one ingredient name need translating.
- Lentils by volumeOne and a half pints of dry lentils is about 3 cups, roughly 1 1/4 lb. Modern split or small green lentils do not need a six-hour soak; two hours or none at all is enough, and unsoaked lentils will simply want a little more of the cooking water.
- A gillA gill is half a cup, so the finish is 1 cup hot milk plus 1/2 cup cream and about half a tablespoon of butter.
- "One bean sound garlic"This is a literal rendering of the French gousse; read it as one sound clove of garlic. It is not a quantity that can be scaled up meaningfully — the garlic here is background, not flavour lead.
- Chinese strainerA chinois — the fine conical strainer. The soup is pressed through a sieve first, then passed again through the chinois for a smoother texture. A food mill or blender does the first pass; the second still matters if you want it velvety.
- Two hours of boilingWith today's lentils this is long. Check at 45 minutes to an hour: the lentils and potatoes should be collapsing. Overcooked lentils will not hurt a puréed soup, but two hours of hard boiling will reduce three quarts considerably, so keep the lid on and top up with hot water if it tightens.
- Allspice, and how muchA teaspoon and a half of crushed allspice is assertive by modern taste. Start with half that, taste after the soup is sieved, and add more before the final ten-minute boil.
- Salt pork and saltHalf a pound of salt pork carries a great deal of salt into the pot. Hold back the added teaspoon until the soup is puréed, then season.
- ChervilRarely stocked. A branch of flat-leaf parsley with a few tarragon leaves stands in for its faint anise note; leaving it out costs little in a soup this robust.
- YieldAbout three quarts finished — twelve first-course servings, or eight generous bowls with the croutons.
À la montagnarde means simply "mountain style," and in French kitchen shorthand it signals the rustic upland combination at work here: lentils, leeks, potatoes and salt pork, the pantry of a region with a short growing season and a pig. Lentils were often regarded as among the cheapest concentrated proteins in French provincial cooking — the Auvergne and the Velay, home of the small green lentil of Le Puy, are the areas most often associated with them — and a soup like this was a meal rather than a course. What marks the recipe as the work of a trained hand is everything that happens after the two hours of boiling: the sieve, the milk, the cream, the second pass through the chinois. The peasant pot is cooked, then disciplined into a smooth potage and sent out with croutons on a separate plate.