This reporter grew up like I did: Luxe lentils.
Talk to anyone who grew up in the 1970s with well-meaning parents roused by Frances Moore Lappé's "Diet for a Small Planet," and they probably have a complicated relationship with lentils.
The gist of the article is that many of us think of lentils with horror because of culinary nightmares of the 70s, but actually lentils can be "luxe" - or certainly delicious. The writer gives recipes for French and Italian specialty lentils used as salads or side dishes, with an Indian lentil stew thrown in for good measure.
Years ago I got the idea from the Chron's food page of mixing warm French black (Puy) lentils with olive oil vinaigrette, fines herbes and parsley, to make a salad. Partygoers in the Bay Area always demolish it with gusto and rave to me, as if lentil salad were a wondrous novelty. And of course the red lentil soup recipe I posted four years ago still gets at least fifty referrals a day from search engines, aggregators and websites worldwide.
The mjaddarah recipe also gets hits every day. Mjaddarah is caramelized onions, lentils and rice, popular in the Levant, sometimes known as the mess of pottage for which Esau traded his birthright; I use Claudia Roden's version because it's road tested, and I like it better than what I learned to make in my village, where we use bulghur wheat.
Here's the basic lentil vegetable soup recipe I cook at least three times a month. I'm always fiddling with it so have fun. Commenters added their own delicious sambhal and dal recipes. I began cooking this soup in the 70s, as a teenager, from "The New York Times Vegetarian Cookbook", whose recipes were much tastier than Frances Moore Lappe. By the time I went to college, I had the recipe essentially memorized, and could cook it anywhere without looking at a book. Of course this means I varied it. Maybe one day I'll find the original recipe somewhere and see how far it has changed. (I find no trace of this book on the internet)
Eating more legumes and less animal protein improves your health and the health of the planet. Lentils are an important part of the traditional diet of Lebanon, and kept my father and his siblings alive in the 1930s. As food prices soar and energy costs make industrialized agriculture expensive for the pocket as well as the planet, let us focus more on eating lentils and other legumes and beans. If you have a large garden, why not plant some this spring?
Comments