4-Ingredient Adas bis-Silq (Lentil & Chard Soup)

Walk into my home on any Sunday in the winter and you’ll likely find a pot of soup bubbling away on the stove. It’s what I call Soup Sunday. Sometimes we have it for dinner that night, sometimes we don’t, but either way, I make a big batch so that we have enough to reheat a nutritious veggie-packed lunch any day of the week. 

A few weeks ago I was looking for soupspiration (that’s a word, right?) and decided to peruse my bookcase of cookbooks. My eye landed on one that I’ve had for decades, Lebanese Cuisine by Madelain Farah.

This cookbook has been a fixture in my home ever since I can remember. Farah is my dad’s aunt, and when the cookbook was published in 1972, my jida (grandmother in Arabic) bought each of her six children a copy. 

My dad’s copy is plastered with his handwriting. As the youngest (and a boy), my dad wasn’t taught to cook. After he married my mom, a fine woman of German-Scottish heritage who didn’t know any Lebanese recipes, he realized he should learn how to make some of his childhood favorites. So he spent several days with his mom, watching her cook while referring to Farah’s cookbook and noting the subtle seasoning variations in the margins. He also wrote her ratio for making hummus on the inside back cover.

Farah was born in Portland, Oregon, but when her family visited Lebanon in the 1930s, they were stranded there as World War II began. She attended school in Beirut before returning to the U.S. Farah’s bio is kind of fascinating. She spoke six languages. She earned her Ph.D. in Middle East Studies. She was a Fulbright scholar and Miss Lebanon-America. And she wrote this cookbook to document her mother’s recipes. 

The first editions of the cookbook were not flashy. It was spiral-bound. The pages were covered in short-and-sweet recipes, each with its name written in English, transliterated Arabic and Arabic. And instead of photographs, black and white sketches were peppered throughout.

The cookbook had been republished four more times before Farah passed away in 1988, selling more than 100,000 copies in total. And in December 2023, her daughter Lelia Habib-Kirske republished it in her honor, trading in the spiral binding for a more common bound one, and working with a friend to photograph many of the recipes.

The new edition is new in so many ways. Gone is the spiral binding. There are color photos on the cover and throughout the book. And everything looks delicious. As I paged through it, wondering what to make first, Adas bis-Silq (Lentil & Chard Soup) caught my eye.

In my little family, we're all die-hard lentil lovers. Whenever we get home from vacation, I often make Instant-Pot Mujadara. And one of the soups I often make in the winter is Lemony Lentil & Chard Soup, inspired by a dish at a Lebanese restaurant I worked at in my 20s. Adas bis-Silq is heartier, studded with chunks of potato, and made with brown lentils (or you could use green or black), which hold their shape, rather than red lentils, which break down as they cook. 

Like mujadara, the soup gets a lot of its flavor from the onion, which is cooked separately until golden brown before being stirred into the soup at the end along with the chard. This is a step I don’t typically do; why not just cook the onion first then add the lentils and water and keep going? But I think it’s kind of genius—the bits of onion don’t get quite as soft, and they keep their caramelly flavor. Then a generous squeeze of lemon over each bowl brightens the flavor. 

We devoured this soup and looked forward to eating it the next day for lunch, and I’ve already made it a second time.

When I spoke with Habib-Kirske over the phone about this recipe, she shared, “Oh we ate it all the time.” Her parents got divorced when she was younger, and Farah was a single working mom. The recipe was inexpensive, quick and fed them for multiple meals.

Like my dad, I scribbled a note alongside the recipe, suggesting the addition of cumin and crushed red pepper, not because it lacked flavor but because I thought it would enhance it. As I went to close the book, I noticed my jida's hummus recipe, inscribed on the inside back cover just like my dad’s copy, and went to my cupboard to get my chickpeas and tahini.