Lentil soup

In the past, lentil soup made with orange lentils, onions, butter and a bacon hock used to be traditional fare on Christmas Eve. A tradition which fell away, to the point where we don't have lentil soup of this sort very often at all, although there has been a revival of another sort of lentil soup recently, most recently noticed at reference 1.

This year we decided to opt for a version of the traditional soup, replacing the bacon hock which I did not have time to source - once upon a time more or less all the grocers which sold loose bacon sold them for next to nothing - including here both Sainsbury's and Woolworths - with a saucisson sec from Bastides via Waitrose.

Starting off with 8oz of orange lentils to 2 litres of water about 100 minutes before the off. At some point, a modest amount of grated, left over potato. Fairly late in the day, adding some carrots and celery. One wants a bit of texture left in the carrots.

Separately gently frying some onions in butter. Adding them and the coarsely chopped sausage maybe 5 minutes from the off.

Regarding the sausage, I was slightly alarmed by the discoloured voids revealed when cutting the thing up. Was it OK to eat? In the end, I pressed on and in the event the discolouring and voids both got lost in the cooking and we did not come down with botulism - or even with regular food poisoning.

We did most of it at the first sitting, most of what was left at a second sitting later the same day and I polished off the very modest remainder for breakfast the following morning.

A fairly watery lentil soup, certainly by traditional standards. But this did have various advantages. It is not so likely to stick to the bottom of the saucepan. The liquor works better on the bread taken with the soup. The soup is not as heavy, a consideration given the amount we take at a sitting. And last but not least, BH prefers her soups and stews to be on the wet side. We shall see next time - maybe giving myself time to source a bacon hock.

I didn't think to keep the labels from this sausage, but as I bought two at the same time, the second lot of labels will probably do. And as it happens I did still have the receipt, tending to keep them for a fortnight or so. Now safely filed away in a special place and all I have to do now is to remember the special place.

So should the second sausage not be up to scratch, I might get myself down to the Waitrose customer service point. Product No.17, bar code number '3 - 275560 124115 - >' and batch number '22270A'.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/12/dahl.html.

Reference 2: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=lentil+soup+bacon. Checking, I find that something else was quite often substituted for the the bacon, never mind the bacon hock. At least in the period covered by this first volume of the blog.