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Dish
Salt, pepper, and powdered 4 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 1 cupful lentils 1 bay leaf 3 sprigs parsley 1 chopped onion mace to taste 1 cupful boiled rice 1½ cupfuls highly seasoned tomato sauce Wash lentils and soak in plenty of cold water four hours. Put into boiling salt water, add bay leaf, parsley, seasonings and cook till tender. Vegetables Chop and fry onion in 3 tablespoonfuls of Crisco, add lentils, rice and remainder of Crisco, stir and allow to get hot. Turn into hot dish and pour over tomato sauce.
A lentil-and-rice dish from the Crisco book's vegetable chapter, printed with its ingredient column and method run together. Reading the list back into order clears up most of the confusion.
- The garbled ingredient listThe first line belongs with the last: "salt, pepper, and powdered mace to taste." The working list is 1 cup lentils, 1 cup boiled rice, 1 chopped onion, 4 tablespoons melted Crisco, 1 bay leaf, 3 sprigs parsley, 1½ cups highly seasoned tomato sauce, and salt, pepper and mace.
- Crisco and substitutesCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and the whole book exists to sell it. Any neutral oil works here, and 4 tablespoons of olive oil suits lentils better than shortening does; butter is fine if the dish is not meant to be vegan.
- The four-hour soakModern lentils, whether brown, green or Puy, need no soaking at all. Rinse, pick over for stones, and go straight into the pot. Red lentils would collapse to purée and are the wrong choice for a dish meant to hold its shape.
- Cooking time"Cook till tender" is 20 to 30 minutes for brown or green lentils in simmering water. Salting the water at the start, as directed, does not toughen them despite the old claim, but very old lentils may never soften whatever you do.
- Rice already boiledThe cup of rice goes in already cooked, so leftover rice would serve here. A cup of cooked rice is roughly a third of a cup raw; cook it separately and let it cool before it meets the hot lentils, or it will turn to paste in the pan.
- MaceMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg seed, warmer and less sweet than nutmeg itself. Ground mace is still sold; a scant quarter teaspoon is enough for this quantity, and grated nutmeg at half that amount is a reasonable stand-in.
- Fish out the aromaticsThe bay leaf and parsley sprigs go into the cooking water, not into the finished dish. Drain the lentils well and remove them before frying, or the bay will end up on someone's plate.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a cup of lentils with a cup of rice will stretch to about four as a main course with the tomato sauce, or more alongside something else. The sauce is meant to be assertive — the lentils and rice bring almost no acidity of their own.
Lentils with rice, onion and fat is a very old and widespread combination, with versions running from the mujaddara of the eastern Mediterranean to the kitchari of South Asia; pulse and grain together supply complementary amino acids, so the pairing is nutritionally sound as well as cheap. Its appearance in The Story of Crisco (1913), written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, has a more particular purpose: the book was published to persuade American households to adopt a new hydrogenated cottonseed shortening in place of lard and butter, and meatless vegetable dishes were useful demonstrations. A dish like this contains no animal fat at all, which would suit Jewish cooks keeping kosher — a market Crisco advertising did court — as well as Catholic fast days and vegetarian households, though the book itself makes no such claim on this page.