mess of pottage

When I was small my mother told me that the mess of potage ruddy Esau traded his birthright away for, after a long day of tramping in the woods, was really a bowl of lentil soup. She probably told me this in order to increase the allure of the lentils she served up on a regular basis in wintertime. I already considered this stuff to be comfort food, simmered as it was all day on the wood stove, until the carrots and the meat from the ham-hock had disintegrated into the velvety silt of lentils, and served with cheese and slabs of homemade buttered bread, so I didn’t really need any encouraging to eat up. But it’s always been in the back of my mind, whenever I tuck into a particularly satisfying lentil stew: What would I be willing to give for this? Would I trade everything away for this bowlful, and not regret it? I always secretly preferred hairy Esau, the uncouth hunter, and wondered if he knew something Jacob didn’t when he agreed to the bargain. Maybe he knew his birthright was in his own limbs, and considered his belly full on lentils to be of greater worth than whatever inheritance the wily Jacob had set his sights on. Consequently I’ve never quite taken lentils for granted, though they’re synonymous with poverty gruel or signal some drear vegetarian regime for many people I know. My friend Brigitte, who used to live here in Chasteuil, won’t touch a lentil because she and her climbing-bum husband and two children lived on nothing else for some very long stretches, a few decades ago.

Around eight years ago my friend Yotam returned from spending New Year’s Eve in Rome and mentioned in passing that he’d been given lentils to eat as part of the festivities. They were supposed to represent little coins, he said, and therefore would bring prosperity for the coming year. Later that same year my own fortunes changed and suddenly I was deciding to walk away from everything I was doing, was deciding to walk through southeastern France with a backpack and tent. I passed through Chasteuil and met Pascal and Nancy for the first time on that walk, and further on I stayed for a couple weeks on a remote farm in the Ardèche mountains, picking beans and tomatoes and pulling briars from stone walls for my room and board. The farmer’s wife taught me her method of cooking the small green ‘Puy’ lentils that are the most common variety here in France. As though carved from tiny bits of tortoiseshell jade, they hold their form during cooking much better than the larger brown liver-spot ones we use in the States.

I moved to New York City when I returned to America, and for the next six years I threw a series of New Year’s Eve parties in the fabulous Central Park West penthouse where I was always lucky enough to be dogsitting for the holidays. A few of these parties were far too big--those who frequented my Beresford parties in those days will remember what came to be called the Seinfeld Incident, which was the catalyst for the drastic scaling-down of the next year’s party (and all subsequent parties) to include no more than twenty invitees, the majority of whom were required to be Irish musicians, who engage in serious all-night booze-ups on a regular enough basis to be relied upon to acquit themselves more decorously, no matter the quantities quaffed, than did the two young champagne-blitzed oligarchettes who somehow ended up at my party and were responsible for the above-mentioned regrettable Incident. But no matter how big or small the party, the centerpiece of my table was always the same: a great vat of green lentils, cooked in the ardèchois style, and no matter how many pounds of lentils I started with there was never anything left, by dawn, but a flaky crust on the sides of the pot. Even Brigitte would have appreciated my thrift, for there’s no cheaper way to feed a houseful of people who’ve already worked up a hunger through several hours of revelrous exertion. And I discovered that for most of my friends this mess of potage was a great novelty; they came to expect the lentils around midnight, for the turning of every year, and this December a few of those Beresford party regulars wrote me to ask for the recipe.

I myself came down with a sudden fever around midday this past December 31st, and for the first time ever I passed New Year’s Eve completely by myself. It was cold, the snows of Christmas week having lapsed into day after lusterless day of fog and rain.

Fortunately I had a good companionable fire going when I fell sick, a good fire several days strong that needed no coaxing, just an occasional feeding. (As I write this, fourteen days into the new year, it’s still the same fire. I haven’t had to strike a match in the morning since then, only rouse the clutch of coals out of the night’s ashes. They awake gnashingly hungry, with a sound like ice floes breaking, as soon as I open the door of the stove and they breathe the morning air. All I have to do is stir the poker among them and drop in another stout log.)

So there were no lentils, but since there was no party either it didn’t occur to me until a few days later that I’d neglected to ward off penury for 2011. It was Nancy who brought up the lentils, one evening when she and Pascal and I were eating together at their house, as we usually do in wintertime when their guesthouse is closed. “I want lentils. I want lentils simmered all day on a wood stove!” She looked at me when she said it, for Nancy and Pascal have a fireplace but no wood stove. So a few nights later they came down to the bottom of the village to my house for dinner, for the first time since I moved to Chasteuil over a year ago. I cook often enough when we eat together, but always in their semi-professional kitchen.

My Godin stove is quite long-barreled, and to ensure the topward heat I would need at the beginning of the cooking process I had to think ahead. About two hours before I wanted to start cooking I stoked the stove with a dense oak log nearly as long as the barrel of my stove is tall.

As soon I heard the vigorous snort indicating that the base of the log had taken, in the nest of coals in the bottom of the stove, I damped the whole stove down to the meagrest flow of air. When I opened its door again two hours later the log was a two-foot pillar of black charcoal, ready to burn hot and hard along its entire length at the first inrush of oxygen. It was still burning too hot and too close to the cooking surface of the stove when I was done with the initial sautéing and boiling and ready to simmer the lentils, so I had to take the pot off the stove for a little while and let the fire burn down a bit.

The lentils and my little stove-side dinner party were a success. If you’d like to cook up a pot for yourself, bold reader, be assured that they taste just as good when cooked on gas or an electric range, and the method I learned in the Ardèche, and have been following with only slight modifications ever since, is as follows.

☛Use french green lentils du Puy, which you can find in any well-stocked American gourmet market or health-food store. Soak a pound of them for 4-12 hours before you intend to start cooking. Lentils are the only pulse you can cook (in a reasonable amount of time) without soaking, so if you forget to soak them proceed anyway, but you’ll get better results with soaking.

☛In a heavy-bottomed pot (a Le Creuset or other cast-iron pot is best) fry a half pound of diced bacon, thick-cut if you can get it.

☛When the bacon is browned, add a few glugs of olive oil and two medium onions, diced. Sauté them until they begin to be translucent, then add several cloves of minced garlic.

☛While the bacon is frying and the onions are sautéing, dice 4 good-sized peeled carrots. You can cut them in rounds if you’re in a hurry, but the texture of the finished dish is more pleasing if the carrot bits are closer in size to the lentils. To dice big carrots cut them in half, split the halves lengthwise like logs, cut these halves in lengthwise strips, and then chop across these strips. Add the diced carrot to the bacon and onions just after you’ve added the garlic, and continue sautéing for another two minutes.

☛Drain and rinse the lentils and add them to the pot. Add enough water to cover the lentils by a half inch, and bring them to a boil. As soon as the pot boils reduce the heat to a simmer, and with a big spoon skim off the green-gray foamy scum that has collected at the surface.

☛After you’ve skimmed the pot, add fresh-ground black pepper, a couple of bay leaves and a good fistful of fresh thyme, still on the branches. (If fresh thyme isn’t available, use a couple of tablespoons of dried thyme.)

Push the thyme sprigs under the surface with a spoon so that all the leaves will slough off in cooking, and simmer the lentils until they soften. Simmering time will depend on how long you soaked the lentils and on cooking temperature, but plan on about an hour. Be sure to simmer them gently; if you boil them they’ll rupture and turn to mush. They’ll still taste fine if this happens, but the dish will lose its toothsome mouth-feel of individual lentils. Keep an eye on the water level during cooking. You may need to add more, especially if you didn’t soak the lentils, but the finished dish shouldn’t be soupy; it should be thick enough you could serve it on a plate.

☛When the lentils and carrots are tender, fish out all the stripped thyme ‘bones’ with a spoon and salt the pot to taste. At this point you can keep the lentils warm on the hob for another good long while, as long as you add a little water now and then and the heat is very low, but try not to mash them with too much stirring.

☛It’s traditional to serve these lentils with sausages, merguez or any other good quality lamb or pork sausage, one or two per person. The woman who taught me this dish added the uncooked sausages when she added the lentils and the water, and effectively boiled them with the lentils. But here’s where I choose to depart from tradition: who doesn’t like a fried sausage better than a boiled sausage? So I pan-fry them separately, lay them whole in the soup-plates and ladle the lentils over them to serve. If you’re making a huge pot of lentils for a crowd of people who’ll be serving themselves, chop the sausages to fry them and add them to the lentils at the last minute. If you want to skip the sausages altogether, use a pound of bacon instead of a half-pound.

☛Eat them and prosper.