Frankfurt Lentil Soup (Linsensuppe)

This soup from Frankfurt, Germany, is served with, believe it or not, Frankfurters! True Frankfurters (Frankfurter Würstchen) are pork sausages in sheep intestine casing. When the casings are stuffed with the pork and seasoning mixture, they are twisted together; and thus, they are sold in pairs. When cooking them separately, they are meant to be heated in hot, but not boiling, water for about eight minutes, otherwise the skin will burst; a definite "no, no," to Hessians.* In Germany, by German law, the sausages must be produced in the immediate Frankfurt area; otherwise, they cannot legally be called "Frankfurter Würstchen." **

Ingredients:

1 pound lentils
48 ounces beef stock 
1 leek stalk, sliced
1 large onion, chopped
1 large carrot, diced
2 medium potatoes, peeled and diced
1 celery stalk, chopped
1/2 pound bacon, cut into 1 inch pieces (or can be diced, if slab bacon)
2 tablespoons cider vinegar
1 to 2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
Frankfurters/Franks, with natural casing, cut into one inch pieces
parsley to garnish each bowl of soup

In a a pot/pan large enough for your soup, over medium heat, add the bacon, onion, celery and carrot. Cook for a few minutes, until the vegetables soften a bit, and a little browning is a good thing. Meanwhile rinse the lentils by first pouring water over them and swishing them around. Discard any lentils that float.*** Then rinse again in a large sieve over running water. (If your package says to soak the lentils first, or to parboil them, follow those instructions, but generally they don't require such.) Add the beef stock to the vegetables, then add the sliced leek and diced potatoes. Bring the soup to a boil, then turn down the heat to let the soup just lightly bubble. Stir in the pepper. Check the lentils, carrot and potato to be sure they are about done, but you don't want them mushy. If the soup is too thick, you can add "up to" a cup of water, without diluting the great broth. Turn down the heat to very low, so that the soup is at just a bare simmer, and add the Frankfurter pieces, stir. Let cook about 10 minutes more. Sprinkle a little parsley on top of each serving.

* Nothing "worst," than a burst Wurst! (In Hessian dialect, "Wurst" is spelled "Worscht," along with the variation in pronunciation. The soup itself is called "Linsensuppe" in standard German, but "Linsesupp," by Hessians.)

** While I did not check on this, I "assume" Germany has agreements with other members of the European Union that also protects the use of the name "Frankfurter Würstchen," just as other countries have product names they want protected.

*** I'm not sure if its really necessary to discard the "floaters," but that's what my mother and grandmother did.

WORD HISTORY:
Twist-This word, related to "two, twine and twin," goes back to Indo European "dwoh/dwah/duwo," which meant "two." This gave Old Germanic "twiss," meaning, "divide into parts." ^ This gave Old English (Anglo-Saxon) "twist," a form which was most often used in compounds and used most prominently in "mæsttwist," literally, "mast rope;" that is, "rope support for the mast of a ship" (rope then often being two strands wound together), and "candeltwist," a forked device with inverted hollows to "snuff out candles" ("forked" is the key here; that is, two divided parts), and also "twist," meaning "the fork of a tree branch." The spelling has remained for lo all of these centuries, but the meaning of "rope," or more particularly the way rope was made, by entwining, winding strands together, became the meaning. The verb came from the same source, which then gave Old English "twislan," meaning, "to divide into two parts, to make a fork of something." Of course, it too followed the noun in meaning later. Other forms in the Germanic languages: German "Zwist" (disunity, strife, both with the notion of "dividing"), ^^ Low German Saxon and Dutch "Twist" (disunity, strife), Swedish "tvist" (strife), Icelandic "tvistur" (two in number games/lots), Danish "tviste" (seemingly archaic, "dispute, strife"). I could not find forms in Norwegian or Frisian.   

^ Just PURELY a guess, but there could have been early forms of the word, likely verbs, in the Old Germanic dialects more direct in meaning to, "divide, separate into two parts," but these words did not last, although descendants did, more especially in one or more of the Low Germanic dialects, which "may" then have passed on the word to the other continental Germanic languages (more than likely one dialect passing it to the next, not all directly from one Low Germanic dialect), thus, the similar meanings (strife, disunity). The same would be true of English, where a descendant of the original word survived, mainly for use in compounds. Old Norse had a form, "tvistra," that stuck to the original meaning, "to separate, to divide," but that meaning is not present in its descendants, which seem to have borrowed forms of the word too, so the original Old Norse form seems to have died out. Gothic had forms, based on "twis," again with the meaning "split apart, break away."        

^^ German seems to have gotten the word from Low German, along with the meaning.