Lentil stew

 

We've had a cold snap in Paris, so this weekend I made lentil stew, and I thought I might as well write it up here.

The stew I make is my version of what was originally a Spanish lentil soup recipe I got from a foodie Händel fan in North Carolina. By now I've altered the balance of ingredients, added more, and made the soup thicker so it can be eaten as a main course. It's a very flexible recipe. Here I'll write it down as I made it this weekend, which was enough for four deep bowls, main-course portions. But you could either double everything to make it for eight, or just double the lentils and water, to make the the lentils more prominent. I sometimes make it that way. It just depends on how 'lentil-heavy' you want it to be. Anyway, this is how I made it for four on Saturday. (In fact there were only two of us, so we had it on Saturday and Sunday, with no starter before, no cheese after, just a pudding each time.)

Living in Paris, I can easily buy lard fumé, poitrine salée, and Morteau sausage, a large, smoked sausage with a Protected Designation of Origin, and Puy lentils, also protected. If I were making this in the UK, I suppose I'd buy a pack of smoked streaky bacon, a pack of unsmoked, and whatever sausages and lentils I could find, and probably grill or fry the sausages and dish them up with the stew at the end, rather than cooking them in it.

Morteau

On Saturday, I went to Schmid, an Alsatian shop near the Gare de l'Est, and bought a thick (about 3/4 inch or 2 cm) slice each of smoked and unsmoked bacon, the Morteau sausage, and two portions of Black Forest gateau for pudding.

From then on, it was all amazingly easy, as lentils are. I cut the bacon into half-inch lardons, threw them into a large pan, added a cup of lentils, three cups of water and some cloves, (you can add a bay leaf if you like), and simmered the lentils for half an hour. I did this in advance, though there's no particular need to, it was just convenient for me that day.

I cut two onions, two carrots, a parsnip and a potato into chunks and fried them for a while in olive oil, until the edges started to colour. There could have been two or three potatoes, but I only had one left in the kitchen. The parsnip was my variant: the original recipe only used carrots. At that point, I sprinkled a heaped teaspoon of mild paprika over the vegetables and turned them over until they were fairly evenly coated.

All of this I tipped into the pan of lentils, scraping in the oily paprika stuck to the pan. I stirred in a whole bunch of flat-leaf parsley, roughly chopped (in fact, hacked at with scissors), and some sea salt and black pepper, sank the Morteau, whole, into the mass, and simmered the stew for 40 minutes more, occasionally checking to make sure there was enough water, and turn the sausage. On Saturday, I didn't need to add any at all.

(I think you're supposed to cook the sausage separately from the stew, but I don't. I prefer to dirty one pan, not two.)

An important detail but one easy to forget: at the end, add a tablespoon of vinegar. The Spanish recipe used sherry vinegar, but I prefer the mild sweetness of balsamic in mine, and in any case I didn't have any sherry vinegar in the cupboard.

At the end, you fish the sausage out and put it in thick slices over the bowls of lentils and bacon.

That's all. I served it with mustard, for the sausage, and baguette, nothing else (except wine, of course: at the moment, we're 'using up' some 2002 Châteauneuf du Pape found hidden away at the back of a garage).