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Puree of Lentils
Soak a pint of lentils in plenty of cold water during the night. Drain on a sieve, then place in a large saucepan with a sliced carrot, a sliced onion, two leeks, two branches celery, one branch chervil, one bean garlic, two raw peeled and sliced potatoes and half pound lean salt pork. Moisten with three quarts water, season with a level tablespoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Place on the fire, and as soon as it comes to a boil skim scum from the surface and add one ounce butter. Cover the pan and let simmer for two hours. Remove the pork and keep it. Press the soup through a sieve, then add half pint hot milk and mix a little; strain through a Chinese strainer into a soup tureen and serve with a plate bread croutons separately.
A straightforward French-style pureed lentil soup, thickened by potato and enriched at the last moment with milk. The only real decisions are how much salt to add up front and how far to push the puree.
- Salt and the porkA level tablespoon of salt plus half a pound of salt pork is a great deal of salt by current standards. Add half the salt at the start and correct at the end; if the pork is very salty, blanch it for five minutes and discard that water first.
- QuantitiesA pint of dry lentils is about 2 cups, roughly 14 oz. Three quarts of water gives a thin soup that reduces over two hours; expect about 8 generous servings.
- Archaic wordingA "bean garlic" is one clove. "Branches" of celery and chervil are stalks and sprigs. A Chinese strainer is a chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer; a fine sieve does the same work.
- Cooking timeTwo hours suits larger whole lentils, and the salt pork wants the time too. Split or smaller modern lentils will collapse well before that, so check early and top up with water if it tightens.
- SoakingThe overnight soak is optional with today's lentils, which cook fast without it. If you skip it, allow a little extra liquid and time.
- PureeingA blender or immersion blender does in a minute what the sieve did in fifteen, and the final pass through the chinois still catches lentil skins if you want the texture the recipe intends.
- The milkAdd the hot milk off the boil and only warm it through. Boiled after the milk goes in, the soup catches on the pan bottom and can look curdled at the edges.
- The reserved porkThe pork is kept deliberately. Slice it thin and serve alongside, or dice and crisp it and scatter it over the bowls with the croutons.
Lentil puree of this kind is standard bourgeois French soup-making: a pulse cooked down with a mirepoix and a piece of salt pork, sieved smooth, finished with milk or cream and served with fried bread. Escoffier-era kitchens catalogued such soups as purees, often giving them proper names — Conti, Soissonnaise, Saint-Germain — as readily as calling them after the ingredient, and the technique described here — skim, butter, long simmer, pass through the chinois — is the classic sequence for all of them. Chervil, called for by the branch, was far more common in period cooking than it is now, and the direction to press everything through a sieve reflects a kitchen with plenty of hands and no motor. Lentils were cheap, kept indefinitely dry, and stretched a half pound of pork across a table of eight.