Emily's Lentil and Parsley Soup

An authentic WWII recipe that could have done with some workshopping...

One of my favorite things to pick up on my various adventures are historical cookbooks. I've acquired quite a number of them since I started this blog, to the point of where my cookbook shelf is overflowing and I can't bring myself to Konmari any of them because they're all such nice publications! 

This year, I'm doing my best to try and dust off a few of them, including the one I got today's recipe from: Victory in the Kitchen: Wartime Recipes. It was published by the Imperial War Museum, one of my very favorite museums. Visiting their impressive exhibits in the early 2000's helped get me really excited about World War II history, so I was eager to try something out. 

The results... weren't exactly what I was hoping for, but hopefully it'll be interesting for everyone to get a look at what kind of stuff you might run into when trying out another historic recipe.

Victory in the Kitchen features a brief introduction about British wartime cooking and rationing, along with a conversion chart for different measurements used in the book. A lot of the recipes use ounces instead of grams, and generally use British measurements because they're authentic recipes pulled from the museum's archives. Giving the conversion chart definitely suggests this was produced with an international (and more specifically American) audience in mind, as the museum gets visitors from all over the world and not everyone is on the metric system or uses imperial units like ounces anymore. British pints are also significantly different from American pints. 

The book is divided into pretty standard chapters: appetizers, mains, desserts, etc. Rationing in Britain was a lot more intense than it ever was in the United States, so a lot of these recipes focus on more austere ingredients that families would have easier access to, with a heavy emphasis on vegetables and alternative sources of protein like cheese, beans and organs rather than traditional cuts of meat. Many have "mock" in the title, as convincing housewives and their families that what the government was selling as good patriotic food could taste just as good as lobster or duck was seen as an important tactic in getting people excited about eating bland wartime food. 

This recipe fits that bill perfectly, and appears in the appetizer section of the cookbook. It's a vegetarian dish with lentils for protein, and... doesn't have much else, to be honest, especially in terms of spices or things that will provide any flavor to the soup. Still, I was interested in it because my wife makes a killer lentil soup which features a lot of the same ingredients, and I was curious to see how similar the wartime final product would be to her truly tasty recipe. 

To start, you dice up 2 ounces of onion and 4 ounces of carrots. Add them to a pan with 1/2 ounce of fat and fry them. 

Onions were considered a delicacy in England as the war progressed, so it makes sense this dish would call for literally an 1/8th of an onion rather than just chopping up the whole thing. Still, it seemed like a surprisingly small amount for a whole soup...

Next, add in a British pint of water (570 milliliters, or about 2 cups and a bit), 2 ounces of dried lentils, and salt and pepper to taste. You could also use powdered milk, but the recipe calls for a very specific kind of powdered milk that was basically only available during World War II in the UK, so I'm not sure our modern equivalent would have the same fat content, and if it does, that can drastically change the quality of the dish. Water seemed like the safer option here. The recipe then instructs you to leave this simmering on the stove for an hour and a half. 

Spoiler alert: that is way too much time. 

So, confession time: I actually made this recipe twice trying to figure out if I'd just messed something up the first time, or if there really was something wrong with the original. I think I have to say there's something wrong with this original recipe. Lentils take about 30 minutes to cook in simmering or boiling water, and they absorb a lot of liquid. I left the lid on the pot and checked on it after half an hour and discovered most of the liquid had been absorbed or cooked off, despite being left at a very low heat, which left an extremely small amount of soup in the pan. It was also less soup and more lentil paste.

You're to garnish with sprouts and fresh parsley once you're ready to serve it. My soup made exactly enough to fill this fairly small bowl, no more, no less. 

It was super, super thick, and definitely could do with some thinning out with more water.

I'm honestly not sure what the issue is here, but I'm guessing it comes down to this recipe not actually being tested by the people compiling the book or who originally wrote it during the war. This does happen sometimes, especially when stuff is being produced quickly for a flyer you're maybe not fully expecting someone to take home and try out. Cookbooks assembled out of archival recipes are also sometimes prone to this because the person gathering the recipes isn't testing each of them out as they're adding them to the manuscript. There's a sort of blind trust to the original recipe's author that we all experience - if this got published, it must work! So it gets added to the cookbook you're going to sell in the museum gift shop because you don't have a dedicated restaurant staff to thoroughly test out all these historical recipes, some of which call for ingredients that might not be readily available anymore. 

So I don't really blame the staff at IWM who complied the book, and I'm sure they didn't intentionally mislead anyone, but I am really blown away by what a disaster this recipe was. If I had left it on the stove for a full hour and a half, I would have burned the lentils. The recipe never asks for you to add more water or encourages you to add some after you've cooked the beans to thin it out, so you're left with a really puny portion of food. This definitely would frustrate me as a wartime cook trying to find a way to feed my family. It also makes me a little healthily wary of other recipes in the cookbook, because maybe I'll run into similar problems with execution and final product. 

As for the soup itself, it was just okay. Unsurprisingly, it was extremely bland except for the pepper - because all the liquid cooked off, all I could taste was the pepper I'd added because it wasn't diluted. My version came out uncomfortably spicy and peppery, but otherwise totally bland. That does make it a pretty authentic meal for wartime Britain, so I enjoyed thinking about it from that perspective, but it's definitely not something I'd make again exactly the way the recipe asks me to. 

Instead, I'd recommend adding a lot more water to the soup, only cooking it for about half an hour or until the lentils are cooked through, and adding some lemon juice for extra brightness and acid. That's definitely not wartime accurate, but it'll make for a much more tasty dish. Fortunately, because it's such a blank slate recipe, you can easily add or subtract ingredients as you want to make it a little less disappointing. 

That being said, I think I'm going to stick to my wife's recipe instead of making this again. While the end result wasn't inedible, it was definitely not what I was expecting, and I think a good soup recipe should make more than one tiny bowl!

Good thing we aren't living in 1943 England!