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Lentil Soup (Tablespoonfuls Crisco pints)
1 cupful lentils. 2 cupfuls milk. 3 tablespoonfuls Crisco 3 pints stock or water 1 onion 1 carrot 2 stalks celery 1 tablespoonful flour 1 bay leaf Salt and pepper to taste 1/4 cupful cream
What survives here is the ingredient list, and it is incomplete in two ways: the lentils themselves are missing, and so is the method. Treat it as a framework rather than a set of directions.
- The missing lentilsA lentil soup on three pints of stock wants about 1 to 1 1/2 cupfuls of dried lentils, roughly 8 to 10 oz. Why the lentils are absent from the list is not recoverable from the page as it survives.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold and still solid at room temperature. Three tablespoonfuls here are frying fat for the vegetables and the base of a small roux; butter or oil behaves the same way, though shortening is flavourless by design, which was the whole selling point in 1913.
- Stock or waterThree pints is six cupfuls, or about 1.4 litres. Household broth from bones was often lightly salted or unsalted, so the "salt and pepper to taste" may carry real weight; with commercial stock, salt at the end only.
- The vegetablesOnion, carrot and celery, diced and sweated in the fat until soft but not coloured, then the flour stirred in and the stock added gradually. Lentils in with the liquid, bay leaf, then a simmer of 30 to 40 minutes for brown or green lentils, less for split red ones.
- SievingPurée soups of this period were commonly pressed through a sieve to a smooth finish. A stick blender does the same work in seconds; left chunky, the flour thickening will look cloudy rather than velvety.
- The creamA quarter cupful, stirred in off the heat at the end. Bring it back to a simmer after the cream goes in and the soup can break or catch; warm it through only.
- YieldSix cupfuls of liquid plus purée gives four generous or six modest servings as a first course.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, roughly two years after Crisco itself went on sale in 1911, and it is advertising in the shape of a cookbook: 615 recipes, most of them ordinary American home cooking with the butter, lard or suet quietly swapped out. The pitch was that a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening was cleaner and kept better than lard, and that it carried no flavour of its own square at cooks who kept kosher kitchens as well as at the thrifty. Lentil soup earns its place because it needed no persuading: dried pulses were cheap winter food, the fat is only there to soften the vegetables and bind the flour, and the recipe demonstrates the product doing the least glamorous job in the kitchen. The quarter-cupful of cream at the end is the concession to gentility that turns a pottage into a course.