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Lentils

A hearty lentil stew cooked with butter, onion, parsley, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Lentils and shallot share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lentils

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the lentils

  1. Combine lentils and cold water in a stewpan.

  2. Add butter, salt, sliced onion, and bouquet of parsley.

  3. Simmer on low heat until tender, about 2 hours.

  4. Drain lentils, reserving the cooking liquid.

Finish the stew

  1. In a clean stewpan, melt butter and add lentils, sugar, pepper, and shallots.

  2. Mix in flour.

  3. Boil gently for 10 minutes.

  4. Serve in a dish or with a potato border.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Lentils + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together20 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Lentils + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together322 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Lentils + flourtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together255 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Lentils
Provide the main body and bulk, softening into a thick, tender stew.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavor and giving the stew a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the stew as it heats, giving it body and a looser sauce.
Shallots
Add a mild, savory aroma and light sharpness to the base.

The step that matters

Boil gently for 10 minutes. Thickening with flour needs enough heat to cook out its raw starchy taste and fully thicken the liquid, but a hard boil can break up the lentils and scorch the bottom of the pan, so keep the heat gentle.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lentils, butter, parsley, sugar, pepper, shallot, flour):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Kalefits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lentils, butter, parsley, sugar, pepper, shallot, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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