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Bean, Lentil or Split Pea Soup
1½ cups white beans, lentils 1 small onion, minced or split peas 2 quarts cold water 1 tablespoon Karo 3 tablespoons Mazola 2½ cups milk 3 tablespoons Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch Salt and pepper to taste Wash the dry vegetable, soak over night in the water and in the morning put on to cook with the Karo and the onion fried till yellow in the Mazola. Simmer until the vegetable is very soft-about two and one-half hours. Add one-eighth teaspoon baking soda and rub through a sieve. Add the milk, bring to boiling point and thicken with the cornstarch blended with a little cold milk. Season to taste with salt and pepper. A little celery salt may be added to the lentil soup, or some minced mint to the pea soup.
A promotional recipe from a Corn Products cookbook, which is why corn syrup, corn oil and cornstarch all appear in a bean soup. The method is sound; the brand names and one or two habits need translating.
- The branded ingredientsKaro is corn syrup, here just a tablespoon for a faint sweetness that rounds out the legumes. Mazola is corn oil, and Argo or Kingsford's is plain cornstarch. Any neutral oil and any cornstarch will do.
- Cooking times vary by legumeTwo and a half hours suits soaked white beans. Split peas collapse in about an hour and lentils in 30 to 45 minutes, and they need no overnight soak at all. Cook until the vegetable falls apart under a spoon rather than watching the clock.
- Soak and cook in the same waterThe recipe soaks the beans in the full two quarts and puts the whole thing on to cook. That is still the best route for flavour; top up with hot water if the level drops below the beans.
- The baking sodaAn eighth of a teaspoon was added to soften skins and help the purée pass the sieve. It works, but it dulls flavour, softens texture toward mush and destroys some of the thiamine. Skip it unless your water is very hard.
- Sieve, blender, food mill"Rub through a sieve" is the 1900s purée. An immersion blender does it in seconds; a food mill gives the same skin-free result the sieve was after.
- Adding the milkBring the purée and milk up gently and stir. A hard boil after the milk goes in risks scorching on the pan bottom.
- ThickeningThree tablespoons of cornstarch adds body to a soup already fairly thick from the purée. Slake it in cold milk, add it in a stream, and let it boil for a minute so the starch loses its raw taste. Use half if you want something looser.
- YieldRoughly two to two and a half quarts depending on how much water cooks away, or six to eight servings as a luncheon course.
This comes from a cookbook published to sell Karo syrup, Mazola oil and Argo cornstarch, all products of the Corn Products Refining Company, which is why a plain pulse soup carries three corn-derived ingredients it does not strictly need. Books of this kind were given away or sold cheaply in the first decades of the twentieth century and were often genuinely useful, since the recipes had to work if the brand was to be trusted. The dish itself is far older: a soaked pulse simmered soft, sieved and let down with milk is the standard purée soup of European and American kitchens, and the trio of beans, lentils and split peas in a single recipe reflects how interchangeably they were treated. The pinch of baking soda was common household practice for hastening soft skins, a habit attested in period cookbooks.