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Lentil Soup

A simple lentil soup made with butter, flour, milk, and croutons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lentils and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 255 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Lentil Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Cook and mash

  1. Boil lentils with onion until tender.

  2. Mash lentils with a potato masher.

  3. Strain the mash through a colander.

Make the soup

  1. Melt butter in a saucepan, then add flour.

  2. Stir in milk and the lentils with their cooking water.

  3. Season to taste.

Serve

  1. Place croutons in each soup plate before serving.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Lentils + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,221 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Lentils
Break down into a thick, creamy body when mashed and strained.
Flour
Thickens the soup when cooked with butter and combined with the liquid.
Butter
Provides fat for richness and carries flavor, and helps the flour cook.
Milk
Adds creaminess and softens the flavor of the soup.
Onion
Softens as it cooks and adds a mild, sweet aroma to the soup.

The step that matters

Cook the flour in the butter. Flour cooked briefly in melted butter coats its starch granules, so they disperse smoothly into the liquid instead of clumping. Cooking also removes the raw flour taste.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lentils, butter, flour, milk, bread):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lentils, butter, flour, milk, bread. 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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