The World That Was - Levantine Lentil and Parsnip Soup

Hello and welcome to The World That Was! 

Today, we'll be making a lentil and parsnip soup. Lentils and root vegetables - like carrots and parsnips - are some of the oldest ingredients in the kitchens of the past, and would have formed a staple for the diets of people in the Levant! This is a recipe that is not explicitly recorded, but is based on Hellenistic-period accounts of food people ate, such as "a broth of legumes and tubers"

In any case, let's take a look at The World That Was! Follow along with my YouTube video above!

Ingredients:

1 tbsp olive oil 2 carrots (chopped) 2 parsnips (chopped) 1 onion (chopped/diced) 1 clove garlic (crushed) 750ml / 3 cups water (or stock) 1/2 cup parsley/cilantro (minced) 3 sprigs fresh thyme cumin ground coriander

Method

1 - Prepare your Pot

To begin with, pour some olive oil into a pot. Olives would have been cultivated along the Mediterranean coast of the Levant in antiquity, thanks to the climate, but not much further inland. Put your oiled-up pot onto a medium-high heat until it starts to shimmer.

2 - Chop your Onion, Crush your Garlic

While your oil is heating up, go slice an onion into thin rings - or into small chunks. Toss this into the olive oil for about 5 minutes, or until it start to turn translucent. At this point, go crush a clove of garlic into the pot, and stir it together with the softened onion. Leave all this to cook for about 5 more minutes over a medium-high heat, stirring occasionally so nothing sticks and burns onto your pot. While this is cooking, go deal with your other ingredients

While your onions and garlic is cooking, go peel your carrots and parsnips, before cutting them down the centre (as best you can) and then dicing them into small half-moons. You could, of course, cut these into rings if it's faster for you - just make sure they're all the same size! Carrots, in antiquity, would have been more purple than today's strains, and Parsnips appear to have been used as well, although to a lesser degree. Greeks and Romans seem to have lumped them together, so it's hard to distinguish which root vegetable they usually meant. But, using half and half here makes for a delicious soup!

When your root vegetables have been chopped, go toss them into the pot. Mix this together so it is all combined. 

Next, you'll need to rinse about a cup's worth of lentils under some clean water, until it runs clear. This is to just make sure there's no dust or pebbles left in them. When they're clean, toss this into the pot, along with about 3 cups or 750ml of water - or, like I'm using here, a stock. I'm using chicken stock, but you could just as easily use vegetable stock to keep this an entirely vegetarian dish!

At this point, you can add some ground cumin or coriander to improve the flavour of your finished dish. These would have been two spices indigenous to the Near East, and most likely used fairly frequently in their cuisine.

Also, mince about a half cup's worth of parsley - or cilantro, if it doesn't taste like soap to you. Toss this in, and give it a stir. Add a couple of sprigs of fresh thyme to your soup at this point. You could strip the leaves off it and put them in instead, but I like to leave them on the woody stalk, so it's easy to fish out when it's done.

Bring all this to a rolling boil over high heat. When it hits a boil, turn the heat down to low, and let it simmer away uncovered for about an hour. Remember to keep stirring your soup every 20 minutes or so. 

You can serve this up when the chunks of carrot and parsnip have next to no resistance when stabbed with a knife. It will look lovely and yellow - or a very pale orange, depending on your lentils. Serve up as is, like I'm doing here, or you could pour this into a blender (or use a stick blender) to make a smoother finished soup, rather than one with large chunks in it. Garnish with a sprig of parsley and dig in!

The finished dish is delicious and herbal. The lentils and root vegetables are very filling, the slight earthniess of the parsnips offset by the sweetness of the carrots. Ground Coriander adds a mild zestiness to the soup, and really improves the flavour. As this is a filling yet fairly simple dish, only requiring a few ingredients, it wouldn't be outside the realm of possibility for the populations of the Levant to have eaten something like this in Antiquity.