Lentils Lens culinaris
No soaking. Puy and beluga hold their shape; red lentils dissolve into a thickener.
3 recipes on this site
In the kitchen
Under heat
Red lentils have no seed coat left after hulling, so they break down into a puree; Puy and beluga keep an intact coat and hold their shape.
Against air
Dry lentils are stable for a long time; cooked lentils left out dry and form a skin within an hour.
In storage
Dry, sealed, cool — they keep for a year or more without much loss of texture.
At the shop
Color should be even and bright. Dusty or faded lentils have likely been sitting in storage a long time.
Which variety, for what
- Puy / French green lentils
- Hold their shape through cooking — best where you want a lentil, not a puree.
- Beluga (black) lentils
- Similarly firm, with a shinier, rounder look on the plate.
- Red / split lentils
- No skin left after hulling — they break down fast into a thick base for soups and dals.
Beyond the kitchen
THE LENS IS NAMED AFTER THEM
The optical lens takes its name from the lentil, because early ground-glass lenses had the same biconvex shape. The Latin lens meant the pulse first; the glass borrowed the word.
AMONG THE FIRST CROPS EVER FARMED
Lentils are part of the Neolithic founder crop package of the Fertile Crescent, alongside emmer, einkorn, barley, peas, chickpeas and flax. Carbonised lentils have been recovered from sites over ten thousand years old, which makes them one of the oldest domesticated foods on earth.
THEY HOLD OR THEY COLLAPSE
Puy and beluga hold their shape completely; red and yellow lentils break down into purée within twenty minutes. This is a property of the variety, not the cook, and choosing the wrong one is why a salad turns to soup or a dal stays stubbornly granular.
ESAU'S BIRTHRIGHT
The mess of pottage for which Esau sold his birthright in Genesis is a lentil stew, named explicitly in the text. Lentils appear as everyday, humble food throughout ancient Near Eastern and classical writing.
A longer history
Lens culinaris was domesticated in the Fertile Crescent around ten thousand years ago and is one of the small group of founder crops on which Neolithic agriculture was built. Carbonised remains appear at Near Eastern sites from the earliest farming levels onward, and lentils spread with agriculture into Egypt, Greece, India and Europe.
They appear in Genesis, in Egyptian tomb provisions, in classical Greek and Roman writing, and throughout South Asian texts. Their consistent association is with ordinary and often poor food — cheap, storable, needing no soaking, cooking fast on little fuel — which is precisely why they endured everywhere they were grown.
India remains the largest consumer and dal is fundamental to its cooking, while Canada has become the largest exporter, growing lentils extensively on the prairies since the 1970s. They have kept a continuous place on the table for ten millennia without ever becoming fashionable, which few foods manage.
