Recipe
Lentil soup with garlic crostoni
Italian tradition says that eating lentils on New Year's Eve brings money in the new year, because the little discs look like coins. We can personally confirm that at 22 we ate a kilo of lentils on December 31 and ended January with exactly 43 euros in our bank account. Maybe we did it wrong. Maybe you're supposed to eat them with the sausage. Maybe they only work for people who already have money. Whatever the explanation, the lentils themselves were the best thing we ate that whole miserable winter.
We had just moved out of student halls into a flat with two people we didn't know very well, and the combined culinary ambition of the three of us could have fit in a thimble. One of the flatmates, a Sicilian law student named Tommaso, decided he was going to fix this. He arrived at the supermarket with us, pointed at a bag of dried lentils, a head of celery, and three carrots, and announced that we were going to eat this, and variations on this, for the next two weeks. He was right, we were. He taught us the tiny things that make a good lentil soup a great one: start the soffritto on low heat so it sweats instead of fries, tuck the parmigiano rind in with the stock so it melts away slowly, and do not even consider serving it without a piece of bread rubbed hard with a raw garlic clove.
What follows is that soup. It feeds two of you for dinner and one of you for lunch the next day, and it costs about three euros to make. If you are a student, it will keep you alive. If you are not, it will remind you of when you were. Eat it hot, with a glass of something cheap and red.
- Prep 10 min
- Cook 30 min
- Serves 2
- Cost €
Method
- 1
Warm the olive oil in a heavy pot over medium heat. Add the onion, carrot, and celery with a pinch of salt. Cook until softened, stirring now and then.
8 min
- 2
Add the minced garlic, rosemary, and bay leaf. Stir for 30 seconds until the kitchen smells like a winter afternoon.
1 min
- 3
Add the tomato passata, stir for a minute until it darkens slightly.
1 min
- 4
Tip in the lentils and the hot stock. Bring to a gentle simmer, lid on but cracked open.
3 min
- 5
Simmer until the lentils are tender and the soup has thickened. Stir every few minutes so nothing catches.
25 min
- 6
Toast the bread under the grill or in a dry pan until golden on both sides. Rub each slice with the cut side of the halved garlic clove. Drizzle with olive oil.
3 min
- 7
Fish out the bay leaf and rosemary stem. Taste the soup, adjust salt and pepper.
1 min
- 8
Ladle into bowls, rest the garlic crostoni on top or alongside, finish with a generous thread of raw olive oil.
1 min
Variations
For a meatier New Year's Eve version, fry 2 chopped Italian sausages with the soffritto. A parmigiano rind thrown in with the stock adds depth (it makes the soup not dairy-free, so note it). Leftover soup blitzes into a great pasta sauce for ditalini the next day. Canned lentils cut the cooking time in half: drain 2 cans, add at step 4, simmer only 10 minutes.