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Croutons (Wash lentils soak twenty-four)
Wash lentils; soak twenty-four hours; drain well. Cut onion, carrot and celery into small pieces, then put them into a saucepan with Crisco, cover, and cook gently for fifteen minutes. Add stock and simmer 2 hours, then rub through sieve. Return to pan, add milk, seasonings, and bring to boil. Moisten flour with 1/2 cupful milk or stock, add it to soup and simmer five minutes. Season to taste and add cream. Serve with croutons of fried or toasted bread.
Lentils are a small leguminous seed, not so generally known as beans, but an excellent nitrogenous food, containing about 25 per cent. protein, more than 50 per cent. starch, with over 2 per cent. fat. They are not used as much as they ought to be.
Croutons are made by cutting bread into tiny cubes and browning through and through in hot oven or putting into a frying pan with 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco and browning well. If latter is used great care must be used as the croutons will brown easily. 1 can lobster 1 cupful breadcrumbs 1 quart milk 1 quart water 1 tablespoonful flour
This is a lentil purée soup as printed in Procter & Gamble's Crisco promotional cookbook, and the text has been jumbled in the original: the method arrives without its ingredient list, and the stray line of lobster, breadcrumbs, milk, water and flour at the end belongs to a different soup entirely. Treat what follows as a set of proportions and cautions rather than a transcription.
- Ignore the trailing ingredient list"1 can lobster, 1 cupful breadcrumbs, 1 quart milk, 1 quart water, 1 tablespoonful flour" is the header of the next recipe in the section, a lobster bisque or chowder. None of it belongs in the lentil soup.
- Working proportionsThe method gives none. For a soup of this style: 1 cup dried lentils, 1 onion, 1 carrot, 1 stalk celery, 2 tablespoons Crisco or butter, 1½ quarts stock, 1 cup milk plus ½ cup to slacken the flour, 1 tablespoon flour, and ¼ cup cream. Serves six.
- The twenty-four hour soakPresumably written for whole brown lentils, which may have wanted more cleaning and soaking than today's. Modern lentils need no soak at all and split red lentils will collapse in an hour; an overnight soak of whole brown or green lentils is more than enough, and skipping it costs only a little extra simmering.
- Two hours is too long nowCurrent lentils cook through in 30 to 45 minutes. Simmer until they crush easily against the side of the pan, then sieve. Held at a simmer for two hours the vegetables give up all definition and the soup takes on a flat, overcooked note.
- Sieving"Rub through sieve" means forcing the solids through a fine mesh with a wooden spoon or pestle, which also removes the lentil skins. A blender or food mill does the same work; pass through a sieve afterwards if you want the skins out.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell it. Hydrogenated vegetable shortening is still sold and will work, but butter or oil sweats the vegetables better and neither affects the structure of the soup.
- The flour slurryMoistening the flour with cold milk or stock before it goes in prevents lumps, and the five-minute simmer afterwards is what cooks out the raw taste. Do not shorten it.
- Add the cream off the heatThe recipe brings the soup to a boil with the milk in it. Milk-thickened purées scorch readily; keep it just below a boil, and stir the cream in at the end with the pan off the flame.
- Croutons'Hot oven' in books of this date is roughly 400-450F; cubes browned at around 400F, turned once, take about ten minutes. The warning about the frying pan is sound -- bread in shallow fat browns very fast, and the pan needs constant attention.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to introduce American cooks to hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a product with no culinary tradition behind it; the book's strategy was to attach the new fat to a broad repertoire of ordinary dishes so that it would appear in every part of a meal. The lentil note appended here — 25 per cent protein, "not used as much as they ought to be" — reflects the era's enthusiasm for proximate analysis, the laboratory breakdown of foods into protein, starch and fat that circulated widely in American domestic writing through the work of nutrition chemists and home economists. Lentils appear to have been less established on the general American table than beans at this date, which is roughly what the author is complaining about. The purée-and-cream treatment, with a flour liaison and fried bread cubes, follows French practice of the period for purées of pulses, and applying it to a cheap pulse was one way of making an unfamiliar ingredient respectable to an American middle-class reader.