Name: Soup Maigre of Rice and Lentils
Ingredients: 1 pint lentils; 1½ cups rice; 2 tablespoons butter; maigre stock (made from cabbages, turnips, onions, celery, carrots, parsnips, and leeks)

Why it works: Lentils and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 109 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Soup Maigre of Rice and Lentils

Ingredients

1 pint lentils
1½ cups rice
2 tablespoons butter
maigre stock (made from cabbages, turnips, onions, celery, carrots, parsnips, and leeks)

Directions

Prepare the stock and lentils

Simmer cabbages, turnips, onions, celery, carrots, parsnips, and leeks to prepare a maigre stock.
Stew 1 pint of lentils in a little water until tender.
Strain the lentils through a sieve.

Cook the rice and combine

Wash 1½ cups of rice.
Stew the rice with 2 tablespoons of butter in some of the clear broth until cooked.
Combine the cooked rice with the lentil pulp.
Season well.
Add the mixture to the strained broth.

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.

Lentils + turniptop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together109 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10,173 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,002 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Cabbage + turniptop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together897 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,418 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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 pulp that thickens the soup and gives it body.
Rice: Cooks until tender, adding starch and bulk to the soup.
Butter: Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and softening the rice.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lentils, rice, butter, turnip, onion, celery, carrot):

Leekfits better
Parsnipfits better
Okrafits better
Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lentils, rice, butter, turnip, onion, celery, carrot. 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.