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Vegetable Sauces and Gravies

A lentil-based sauce made with onion, tomato, salt, and nut butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lentils and tomato work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 463 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Vegetable Sauces and Gravies

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cook lentils with onion slices until tender.

  2. Rub the cooked lentils through a colander.

  3. Mix in stewed and strained tomato, salt, and nut butter.

  4. Use nut meal or cream if preferred.

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 + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together463 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Tomato + buttertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,918 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Lentils
Provide the body and thick texture that make up most of the sauce.
Stewed and strained tomato
Adds moisture and mild acidity for a bright, savoury flavour.
Nut butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the sauce a smooth, creamy mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Rub the cooked lentils through a colander. Lentils must be fully tender before straining, since firm lentils will not pass through the colander and leave a grainy, uneven texture in the sauce.

Swap the lentils

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, tomato, butter):

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Chickpeafits better
  3. Sesamefits better
  4. Lentilsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, tomato, butter. 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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