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Lentils and Rice
3 tablespoonfuls Crisco ½ cupful lentils ½ cupful milk 1/2 cupful water 1 teaspoonful curry powder 1 small onion 1 tablespoonful lemon juice 1 cupful boiled rice Salt and pepper to taste Wash lentils and soak them in milk twelve hours. Melt Crisco, slice onion and fry a pale brown, add curry powder, milk, water, seasonings, and lentils, simmer two hours and add lemon juice just before serving. Serve with rice.
Vegetables
A 1913 curried lentil dish built around Crisco's then-novel selling point: a vegetable fat that behaves like lard. Two things need attention before you cook it — the twelve-hour milk soak and the two-hour simmer, both of which belong to an older kind of lentil.
- The soak, done safelyTwelve hours in milk at room temperature is a 1913 assumption about a cool larder and daily-delivered milk. Soak in the refrigerator, and use the same milk for cooking so nothing is lost.
- Modern lentils cook fastBrown or green lentils today generally need 25-35 minutes; after a soak, less. Two hours will reduce them to a thick puree. Judge by texture and pull them when tender.
- Milk plus acidSimmering lentils in milk for a long stretch invites curdling, and holding the lemon juice back to the last moment, as the recipe does, avoids it. Keep the pot at a bare tremble, stir often, and add the lemon off the heat.
- CriscoThree tablespoons of any neutral solid or liquid fat does the same job — vegetable shortening, a mild oil, or ghee, which suits the curry powder.
- Bloom the curry powderThe instruction to add it to the browned onion before the liquid is the hinge of the dish. Give it thirty seconds to a minute in the hot fat; raw curry powder stirred into liquid tastes dusty.
- Quantities"1½ cupful" of lentils to 1½ cups milk and ½ cup water is a tight ratio for unsoaked pulses; the overnight soak accounts for it. Keep extra hot water or milk at hand and loosen as it thickens.
- RiceOne cup of boiled rice is the cooked measure, not raw -- roughly 1/3 cup uncooked. The recipe says only 'boiled rice' and does not specify a variety.
- YieldRoughly four as a main vegetable dish, six alongside other things; the recipe itself gives no yield. Salt generously at the end; lentils absorb a surprising amount.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil to teach American cooks what to do with a product that had no precedent in their kitchens: hydrogenated cottonseed oil, introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911. Because it was neither butter nor lard, Crisco was marketed hard to households keeping kosher and to those avoiding animal fat, and the vegetable chapter is where that argument is made most plainly — dishes like this one need a frying fat, and here it is one with no meat in it. Lentils and rice together are far older than the book, the pairing running through Middle Eastern and South Asian cooking as mujaddara, kushari and khichdi, and it is khichdi, filtered through British India, that most likely explains the curry powder and lemon juice. The result is a genteel Anglo-American curry of the period: mild, milk-thickened, and served with rice rather than mixed into it.