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Lent Soup

A hearty soup made with lentils, onions, carrots, turnip, green onions, parsley, and served with toasted bread squares.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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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 ↓

Lent Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup base

  1. Heat the chopped onions with butter in a large saucepan, covering with a lid, without browning.

  2. Add the washed lentils, water, salt, and pepper.

  3. Simmer gently for 2.5 hours.

  4. Rub the mixture through a sieve.

  5. Return the strained mixture to the saucepan.

  6. Bring to a boil.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the green onions, grated turnip, and carrot.

  2. Boil for an additional 30 minutes.

  3. Stir in the chopped parsley a few minutes before serving.

  4. Serve with plenty of toasted bread cut into small squares.

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 + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together109 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  3. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  5. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 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
Provide the main body and thickening starch that gives the soup its texture.
Butter
Adds fat and rich flavour when used to soften the onions gently.
White onions
Build a sweet, savoury aromatic base for the soup.
Turnip
Adds mild sweetness and earthy flavour to the finished soup.
Carrot
Adds subtle sweetness and colour while contributing body to the soup.

The step that matters

Rub the mixture through a sieve. Pressing the cooked lentils through a sieve breaks them down into a smooth, thick purée. Leftover whole pieces would make the soup grainy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, lentils, pepper, turnip, carrot, parsley, bread):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, lentils, pepper, turnip, carrot, parsley, 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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