Sep 28 2008
Recipe Thyme! Lentil Soup Recipe Alert!
A Recipe. Lentil soup and family memories…
I stumbled across this recipe this morning. One of the first recipes, I ever made as a child, taught to me by my great Aunt Lilly. This recipe and others have been taken from and featured in the book, The Road Letters—a memoir about love, travel, food, relationships, and coming of age! Enjoy!
Available autographed at The FeenX Gallery!
When I was a little boy, maybe 4-5 years old, I spent a lot of time with my grandmothers. My mother would drop me off at their house and I would spend endless hours playing house with them—It wasn’t a game for them—just another day working from home. My grandmother and great aunt had their own seamstress business. Imagine the excitement for a 5 year old child! So, I either drew, sewed, or helped cook in the kitchen. Busy work mostly, but I learned a lot—I can sew a button if I have too—could you?
I had a very important job with the making of lentil soup, a soup that played a big role in our family—it was a lucky soup that was supposed to bring fortune! Money anyway. A very tasty soup that the entire family could make. Each with slight variations to the amount of individual ingredients—offering subtle differences that they each claimed made their version the best. So there was some pressure here for excellence—you would be rated or berated… Maybe that’s where this blog was really born
What was my important job? I was the lentil sorter! If you’ve ever read the package of legumes it will say this is a product of nature and may contain other ingredients you might not be so interested in including. So this required someone to separate the lentils from the foreign material—lentil by lentil! A time consuming fastidious—IMPORTANT JOB! Kept me busy anyway… You can’t imagine if uncle so-and-so got a small stone instead of a tender lentil!
Road Recipe
Lentil Soup—Have your kids sort the lentils! Wash hands!
(The first recipe ever taught to me by Aunt Lilly)Ingredients:
chicken and beef stock
carrots
onions
garlic
celery
lentils
salt and white pepper to taste
olive oil
ham hock
ditaliniDirections:
- Combine all ingredients and reduce by half.
- Pull cooked ham hock from bones and chop and reserve, toss bones.
- Hand blend 1/2 of the soup until smooth and then mix with the other half.
- Boil ditalini in chicken stock, cook until al dente, strain.
- Add ditalini and chopped ham hock to cooked soup.
- Serve with grated Parmesan (optional)
Suggested Accouterments:
Cocktail: Harveys Bristol Cream Sherry
Wine: Pinot Noir
Beer: Sam Adams Boston Lager
Music: Background noise from the 6 o’clock Eyewitness news
from the early ‘70s
I can still here the theme from the 6 o’clock Eyewitness news and I can still picture my grandmother watching the news, in a mirror, setup to allow her to watch while sitting at the sewing machine. I can still smell the lentil soup and aunt Lilly’s voice saying come to the table. I miss Grammy and aunt Lilly…
You have to read the book to fully understand why amounts aren’t included in the recipe. It’s quite an interesting irascible thread intertwined into the book… You should read the book anyway! To view the book trailer visit: The Road Letters official website.
I’ve read it and enjoyed it. Thank you.
Thank you Gail!
—Phil
I miss Grammy and Aunt Lilly too!! In such a short paragraph or two you have brought back so many memories of them and the great food, sights and smells that came out of that kitchen!
And honestly, their lentil soup was really the best version I ever had! I have tried to make it myself for my family and it has never been the same consistency. I guess I know now that I was supposed to blend half of it!
Hi Christine!
Yeah, sometimes it’s not even like they’re gone, yet they are…
Secret: they didn’t blend half of it, that’s my addition. Actually, they both made it slightly different than each other. Grammy used more garlic than Aunt Lilly.
Hope all is well—thanks for stopping by!
—Your Cousin iChef
Imagine my surprise when Googling a lentil soup recipe similar to that of Coco Pazzo’s (not this one) that I would run across a recipe very similar to the family recipe I grew up with, and that its author would share my original surname — Ribaudo! I’m fairly certain we are not related, but what we don’t share in blood, we share in family names and recipes. Ha!
That’s awesome! And surprising! I don’t know any Ribaudo’s named Lisa, but when I was growing up I didn’t know any other Ribaudo’s at all. Now, they’re all over the country!
Thanks for visiting! Maybe we’ll see you at some family reunion, but please stop by here every once in a while and say hello!
Ciao,
iChef
Ah Phil, unlike you I was never a lentil fan at the time. Now that I am I’m always looking for a better way to make them. I’ll have to try this one.
None of us will ever forget Grammy and Aunt Lilly’s Kitchen or cooking. Their spaghetti sauce, sphinge (sp?), leg of lamb w/ potatoes, pizza (dark or otherwise), meatballs, fried veggies, shall we keep going? The place was amazing and we all miss them and wish our kids could have known them.
I’m still surprised that back porch never fell off the back of the house with everyone we used to jam in there.